In his first book since the bestselling Fermat's Enigma , Simon Singh offers the first sweeping history of encryption, tracing its evolution and revealing the dramatic effects codes have had on wars, nations, and individual lives. From Mary, Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code, to the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II, to the incredible (and incredibly simple) logisitical breakthrough that made Internet commerce secure, The Code Book tells the story of the most powerful intellectual weapon ever known: secrecy.
Throughout the text are clear technological and mathematical explanations, and portrayals of the remarkable personalities who wrote and broke the world's most difficult codes. Accessible, compelling, and remarkably far-reaching, this book will forever alter your view of history, what drives it, and how private that e-mail you just sent really is.

Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Edward Felten, Andrew Miller, Steven Goldfeder, Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, Princeton: Princeton University Press (forthcoming), 2016. This textbook closely follows the video lectures in the course. The official and professionally done version of the book will be out this summer.
Introduction to the book
There’s a lot of excitement about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Optimists claim that Bitcoin will
fundamentally alter payments, economics, and even politics around the world. Pessimists claim
Bitcoin is inherently broken and will suffer an inevitable and spectacular collapse.
Underlying these differing views is significant confusion about what Bitcoin is and how it works. We
wrote this book to help cut through the hype and get to the core of what makes Bitcoin unique.
To really understand what is special about Bitcoin, we need to understand how it works at a technical
level. Bitcoin truly is a new technology and we can only get so far by explaining it through simple
analogies to past technologies.
We’ll assume that you have a basic understanding of computer science — how computers work, data
structures and algorithms, and some programming experience. If you’re an undergraduate or
graduate student of computer science, a software developer, an entrepreneur, or a technology
hobbyist, this textbook is for you.
In this book we’ll address the important questions about Bitcoin. How does Bitcoin work? What
makes it different? How secure are your bitcoins? How anonymous are Bitcoin users? What
applications can we build using Bitcoin as a platform? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? If we were
designing a new cryptocurrency today, what would we change? What might the future hold?
Each chapter has a series of homework questions to help you understand these questions at a deeper
level. In addition, there is a series of programming assignments in which you’ll implement various
components of Bitcoin in simplified models. If you’re an auditory learner, most of the material of this
book is also available as a series of video lectures. You can find all these on our Coursera course . You
should also supplement your learning with information you can find online including the Bitcoin wiki,
forums, and research papers, and by interacting with your peers and the Bitcoin community.
After reading this book, you’ll know everything you need to be able to separate fact from fiction when
reading claims about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. You’ll have the conceptual foundations you
need to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network. And you’ll be able to
integrate ideas from Bitcoin into your own projects.
https://www.coursera.org/course/bitcointech

《经典密码学与现代密码学》主要从三个方面来介绍密码学的知识：第一部分介绍了经典密码学的经典问题，包括单码加密法、仿射加密法、多码加密法、多图加密法和换位加密法；第二部分介绍了现代密码学，包括流加密法、块加密法和公钥加密法；第三部分介绍了密码学的未来，并对量子加密法进行了简单介绍。《经典密码学与现代密码学》—个突出的特点足，对密码破解进行了详细描述，使读者既掌握加密的内部算法，又能了解各种加密法的弱点。与《经典密码学与现代密码学》配套的CAP软件实现了各种加密法，读者可以利用该软件进行加密和解密，从而增强了《经典密码学与现代密码学》的科学性和适用性。每章末尾还给出了一些复习题，给读者以很大的启发和想象力。
《经典密码学与现代密码学》不仅是一本很好的密码学教材，对密码学研究人员和广大密码学爱好者也都是一本不可多得的参考用书。