Customer Reviews

Introduction to Cryptography with Coding Theory (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The problems with this book are:
(1) The authors failed to explain the math involved in neither rigor nor
intuitive way. The authors frequently try to introduce algorithms before
explaining the concepts or definition.

(2) The book is a mixture of number theory, linear algebra, cryptography, mixed
almost randomly, without proper dependency logic. Neither cryptography algorithm,
no number theory or linear algebra concepts involved are explained clearly.

(3) It is more like a notebook taken by a student. It appears that the authors
simply submit the lecture notes for publication, none efforts were made to
turn a lecture notes to a published book.

Readers are not their students, they do not have access to the authors.
It appears to me that this is the only explaination, since I hate to doubt the
authors capability in writing a textbook in this field. I simply can not imagine
a competent professor in his field writing such a confusing textbook.

I hate to spend my time in writing this note, but this book wasted too much my time,
I just hope others will be lucky that I am. My knowledge in both math and CS are above
Master degree level.

I highly, highly recommend this book to anyone who either is taking a course in cryptography in school or wants to learn about it. It is a very well written book which clarifies a lot of basic concepts. I bought it as it was recommended by my professor in school and managed to get an A in the course. It is a good book and I think it helped me come back after a lecture and find all the matter that I needed. Good reference material.

This an excellant reference text-book for cryptography students and teachers, and could be by far the most comprehensive introductory level cryptography text-book. A welcome addition for every math/computer-science major's personal library.

Nema

Hi. This is a very good book for university studies or also for personal use too. Easy to read and understand. There are few mathematical details (this is a negative feature) but it explains very well all arguments. The only really negative thing is the cost, a little much ...
Otherwise, i suggest you this book.

Knowing very little about cryptography when I started, I found this book taught me the fundamentals of cryptography with useful examples as it walked me through the material. In addition, it was a useful reference for applying this newfound knowledge to the actual practice in use today, especically on the internet. This book is a must-have for anyone needing an understanding of cryptography.

If more mathematics textbooks were written like this one, the number of mathematicians/scientists in the world would be much greater.
The book is an absolute pleasure to read. The discoursive style makes what surely can be considered as a hard subject smooth and easily flowing.
The subject is very well covered and the structure of the book is just fine, even for self-study.
Algorithms, encryption methods, mathematical theorems are nicely and elegantly explained and no previous knowledge is necessary in any of the fields.
At the end of many explanations or proofs I found myself stunned by the brevity and beauty of the argument.
I enjoyed also the nice software support and exercise coming with the books.

I've read (or skimmed, as the case may be) some other writings on cryptography and none of them are really as clear as Trappe and Washington's book. Applied Cryptography comes somewhat close, but doesn't include enough math. Intro. to Cryptography with Coding Theory comes as close to the right balance between math and cryptography as possible. Right now, I'm taking one of Prof. Trappe's classes and I always am confident that if I feel I'm not going to remember the part of the lecture, I can easily refer to the book. The book is actually good enough to discourage me from taking notes and just pay attention instead. Not only that, but the code that's provided is offered in Maple, MATLAB, and Mathematica. Could you ask for more?

I was a newbie of cryptography area and I searched a lot of books before buying this. I found that most of them just explained topics which you can easyly find on the Internet.

However I was looking for something which I could learn the mathematical backgound of cryptography without being a mathematician. This book explains everthing very simple. This book not only gives the explanation of RSA but it also explains required number theory for it and if you know a programming language you can code the algorithms and see what's happening.

This is the book where you should start studying cryptography and after reading this, you can go further. BTW, I also recommend "A Friendly Introduction to Number Theory". With these two books I have my own cryptography library.

Trappe and Washington give us a very up to date education in cryptography, circa 2005. The discourse is for a sophisticated maths student who, however, need never have encountered cryptography before. The level of mathematical treatment is good and rigourous. With theorems stated and proved at a level that should satisfy even a picky mathematician.

The recent nature of the book is reflected in several places. Notably where it explains the Advanced Encryption Standard, or Rijndael. This is significant because it is endorsed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology as the replacement for DES, in such contexts as electronic commerce. (DES is also covered by the book.)

Interestingly, the authors offer a short chapter on digital cash. A fascinating look at a possible future direction of a (physically) cashless society. Other texts on cryptography rarely cover the topic, so it's good to see it here. Yes, the first implementations of digital cash largely died in the dot com crash. But the idea lives on, and may yet take fruit. It has solid intellectual foundations, as shown by the book.

Then there is an even more speculative chapter on quantum cryptography. Radically different from the symmetric and public key cryptosystems described in the rest of the book. Who knows how quantum cryptography will turn out? Some very hard physical problems need to be solved.

This book uses a lot of mathematical notation and lacks explanations in words to accompany them, making it hard to understand some of the concepts. There don't seem to be enough examples to really understand what's going on. I'd say this book is great for people who are already familiar with cryptography and very familiar with math but for those who don't think in terms of mathematical proofs, it's not so good.