Customer Reviews

The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms: Over 600 Mystery Codes to Be Cracked!

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

 

 

Bought this for a gift and all I hear about are the errors throughout the book. Would not recommend.

Not only are the cryptograms unedited, but the paper is poor--very thin and my pencil scratched holes. The puzzles are either too easy, too hard, or poorly edited. Too bad. I love cryptograms and have done zillions. Longing for a good, new book with good paper, letters and lines properly spaced, and fun quotes. I'll keep looking. Can't recommend this.

If you don't mind the same letters equaling the same letters, it's interesting. However "Y" may equal "y" in one quote, and in the next quote "m" might equal "m". It's very confusing & not well edited.

This book was not a "good buy."

I bought this book for my daughter, who is interested in these types of books. I usually stick to more scholarly work with authors who have a more dignified biography. I was not surprised to learn that this book is not much of a book at all; the book was of the cheapest material and had little preparation in terms of editing. After reviewing the book with my daughter, we concluded that [1] the author had no editorial skills, [2] no taste in font and its effect, id est, the hard-to-read text, and [3] the lack or know-how on the subject of cryptology. I even spotted plagiarism in the book, which left me in disgust. I sent it to the rubbish pile after that.

Upon review, this book is unfortunately bad, if not paltry. Moreover, the author gives an uppity, déclassé vibe. Just read her autobiography under her name! She dropped out of a non-reputable college and was saved by the United States Air Force, where she worked on the "SR-71 and U-2 reconnaissance aircraft." The latter claim is truly laughable; she more-likely cleaned the floors and grew discontent for those honourable men who flew and maintained the aircraft.

If you plan on buying this book--or any other book by this self-described author, producer, manager, multilingual cryptographer--don't.

Elonka Dunin, one of the sharpest cryptographers of this or any other age, has created a superb tutorial of cryptography --an entire classroom in a single book! A reader can be at any level of skill in cryptography and achieve full enjoyment of this marvelous work. Excellent coverage of the latest in cryptograms, including Da Vinci codes and the hardest puzzle to challenge experts in a decade: KRYPTOS (Google it!) This book could be your training ground for solving the best of unsolved cryptograms of this and recent centuries.

I have to say; there is nothing worst than working on a beginner puzzle for an extended length of time only to find out that the number of words in the problem did not match the number of words in the solution.

I like a challenge so I don't like looking at the clues or solutions before starting a problem. However, it is rather disappointing to know that I was doomed to fail from the start on a beginner's level problem. For example, easy 100 puzzle #2, page 18.

To be fair, I decided to goggle and see if the author had a web site that I could download identified corrections for the book. The author had a website that had an "Errata" section for this book but I found it not to be comprehensive.

There are some interesting complex problems in the book I would like to dig into but I a little hesitate because of the "Typo" factor.

However, I think this book has some value so I gave it two stars because it made me appreciate the subtle details of the English language. There is nothing like making a unrecognizable word "recognizable" and solving a puzzle.

This book is a nice enough collection of more than 600 puzzles for one's enjoyment but is hardly more than a simple introduction to the most common codes and ciphers. It repeats the same general knowledge usually found by a simple internet search on cryptography.

This was an enjoyable read. Lots of info on various codes used through history. I'm a puzzle lover and this provides a lot of insight into the thought processes behind codes and helps break them down.