Interesting, informative, geniously narrative, fascinating & enlightening.

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	• The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-breaking Simon Singh Fourth Estate Ltd, 1999 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 253 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Excellent Book on the History of Codes

"The Code Book" is a highly readable, engaging and informative book on cryptology (the science of code-making and code-breaking). The book covers the evolution of secrecy across time and addresses the current state of this science.

For those interested in codes in general, this is a staple book...highly recommended.

A History of Ciphers, With Proper Credit for the Cracking of ENIGMA

Singh has provided the reader a delightful history of encryption, beginning with 16th-century codes, proceeding with the mechanized ones, and concluding with modern computer-based systems. He points out how modern encryption is being used to thwart the counterfeiting of dollars, and rejects the so-called Bible Code.

Singh also touches on the intricacies of language, and discusses the difficulty of deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphics. This involved the decoding of a language that no one speaks today, and one which has no close relatives among modern languages. He also has a fascinating account of the Navajo Indians and their unique language, and how their conversations were used to keep the Japanese in the dark during WWII.

When in comes to the German ENIGMA code of WWII, and in contrast to some English-language books on this subject, Singh gives credit squarely where it is due. He traces the Polish successes with code-breaking, beginning with the cracking of Russian codes by the Biuro Szyfrow (the Bureau of Ciphers) during the 1920 Polish-Bolshevik War (p. 144). In the years before WWII, a Polish team of mathematicians headed by Marian Rejewski recognizably solved the ENIGMA (p. 155). The Poles were ten years ahead of anyone else in this field (p. 160). The later successes of the British at Bletchley relied on Rejewski's work (p. 170), and followed the lead of the Poles (p. 243). Alan Turing followed Rejewski's strategy (p. 171).

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Interesting, informative, geniously narrative, fascinating & enlightening.

This great book might on one hand be seen as an introduction to
cryptography (producing codes) and cryptanalysis (breaking codes), and on
the other hand as an anthology of slightly dramatized biographies of
certain individuals, throughout the whole history of codes and ciphers,
related to corresponding major events.

The style of the book is a successful and well-structured mixture of
popular science at its best and somewhat rigorous descriptions of
concepts and algorithms of various complexity. It starts off with telling
the story of the so called 'cipher of Mary Queen of Scots', then
successively deals with, for instance, the initial invention of a
theoretically unbreakable code (through using random numbers) and its
practical drawbacks, the rise and fall of the Enigma code, the usage of
codes in the form of unusual (hopefully unknown to the enemy or opponent)
languages, the analysis of ancient forgotten languages, privacy issues
including safe transfering of code keys and, finally, ends with
discussions of modern, and possibly future, cryptography/cryptanalysis-
techniques based on quantum computers and theory.

Moreover, additional interesting, and in some instances somewhat more
technical, material is referred to several appendices.

Note: The swedish translated edition includes quite a lot of Sweden-specific
information. (Translator: Margareta Brogren.) In all respects this is a
most impressive piece of work!

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The Code Book

I found it interesting and well written. Relize Simon is a Brit, so slightly a different type of sentence structure. I found sometimes that I just could not put the book down. I found out about the book from MAA. It's a college Math Mag playing with Hamming Code. Got interested in the artical about the book and then purchased it. Out of the three cyrpto books I bought this was the best. Others focused on the mathmatics and were not translated well from German.

Fun Read

Great Book! A fun read and very interesting. A history of code making and code breaking from the beginning until now.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

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