software design

This review is for the 3rd edition -
I'm not a cryptographer by any means. I've owned Applied Cryptography(AC) for 4 years. It's been quite helpful but leans farther into theory (not covered in it) than I was willing or able to research at the time. I often found myself needing to refer to other resources over the years. I purchased this book after thumbing through it a few times at the bookstore. I'm not one to run out and spend $80 on a book in haste. After a couple of collective hours in it at the store I bought it with the intention of returning it in the 30 allotted days for a full refund. That date comes tomorrow and I have no intention on returning it.

I would describe it as a self-contained reference. It covers cryptography principles and practices as the title implies. When discussing the algorithms it covers them with roughly the same notation and detail as AC. However, I found the explained examples to be clearer. When I found myself getting lost I took the text's advice and referred to the chapters on mathematics and number theory. Not only did it clear the fog it also bit me with the math bug. Leading me to buy another great book, Prime Obsession (nothing to do with crypto). I should mention that this book is void of code. I didn't find this to be a problem because if I'm not using a crypto lib I usually have to implement the crypto code from scratch. With the knowledge presented in this book I can do it better. FYI: The OpenSSL lib offers a bunch of implemented algorithims.

I am looking at the previous reviews and am really surprised that the book has been published in Aug 2002 (just recently) and the earlier reviews show that they were posted in year 2000 and 2001. It is just confusing the readers because they are not the real reviews. I have not gone through the book, so I don't know how good or bad it is, but at least I know that the reviews are not real. If the reviews are for the earlier editions, then they should be posted under those editions, which anyway have a different ISBN number. Really disappointed.
Unfortunately, I have to put some rating for the book, as in the submission form it is a mandatory field. Hence, I have to put some rating for my submission to go through. I am just putting an average rating, but please ignore my evaluation, as I have not even seen the book.

One of the better books in Security, concentrating on algorithms, rather than stopping at attack descriptions. Very detailed coverage of converntional and public-key encryption. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Security and has some knowledge on algorithms.