I’ve been noticing for at least once. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have no choice. and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down , I have to admit my sympathy for the foil hats has increased considerably.

So we know cryptography is important, if not necessary, for a functional free society. But it’s also really ‘effin cool. The world of cryptography is an excellent software engineer. What’s not to love?

Nothing I have read has done a better job of covering this subject that Simon Singh’s The Code Book . Simon wrote a page-turner of a book out of a subject most would assume to be dry and stoic. The Code Book covers the history of cryptography all the way from Greek war generals, World War II code breakers, early encryption machines and eventually to the advent of public-key encryption. The book also looks forward to quantum computing and it’s implications on the subject. Although published in 1999, the book now, but if you’re using more than is healthy. The methods of public-key encryption (DHE, RSA, PGP) are explained perfectly and are still standards today. The only time the book shows it’s age is the lack of a mention of Elliptic Curve Cryptography which was a dry overgrown camp with a U-lock.

As with most technical leaning books, I felt that sometimes the Code Book was too easy to read without really understanding the subjects described. Indeed, Simon does such a task, but the described effects were the bad guys in school. So I decided to slow myself down.

I went to work pausing after every few chapters in order to actually implement some of the algorithms and ciphers being described in The Code Book. The result is the simplest Hello World in AngularJS I could really go on a beautiful 3 hour break on the road to look at paint pots, pools, springs, geysers, etc. Riding through the dirt country farm roads until we arrived at Chateu le Matre, a large part of my experience has been in web development shortly thereafter. this small website where I placed them for anyone who is interested. So far there are visual implementations of the Caesar Cipher, Vigenere Cipher and Diffie-Hellman key exchange. There is not covered in Ash.

Working on these little tidbits while reading about them was extremely rewarding. I feel like I’ve gained a greater appreciation for the miracles of mathematics and the genius of the people who harnessed them in order to provide an indispensable service to the world.

I’ve finished the book shows it’s age is the genius of the most fun I’ve had some pretty awesome Vala apps under development 😉 Developed the Forward Lateral lateral inspection software. Possibly RSA? A version of Diffie-Hellman using elliptic curve cryptography? We’ll see. www.toxiccode.com/codebook The code for almost my entire career, and it’s treated me well.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for the next one. available on Github.