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professorfate's review against another edition
4.0
Yes, I finally made it through this book! It is very interesting (if you're interested in cryptography), but it is very dry. It took me four months and two breaks to read the almost 1000 pages of text.
snowmaiden's review against another edition
4.0
I spent a whole summer reading this book when I was laid up in bed with a bum ankle and a heating pad. Besides telling more than I ever thought there was to know about the history of secret communications, it also taught me a lesson on how to write something both scholarly and entertaining. When I was in library school, my professors often told me that my papers were not just well-researched, but also very readable. (One called my 15-page tome on the history of the Copyright Clearance Center "a real page-turner"!) I think I owe the credit for that entirely to this book and David Kahn, who managed to make 1200 pages fly by and leave me wishing for more in the end.
binaryslate's review against another edition
3.0
Very comprehensive history, but told in a very dry manner, was very difficult to get through
tony_t's review against another edition
4.0
Although dated (this volume was last updated in 1996) David Kahn has written a masterful and comprehensive history of secret writing and the attempts to break those encyphered or encrypted messages. It was fun to render some of these techniques into computer code and it helped me to gain insights into the inners workings of the arious approaches. Equally as interesting were the stories of individuals who labored long and hard to decrypt messages. A big part of the work deals with the military, of course, but Kahn also includes business, rum running and then, with the advent of the computer and the internet cryptography becomes an integral part of most online transactions (https://; Signal texting app; VPNs; etc.). This book requires a big investment of your time (1000 pages) but if you are sufficiently interested you will not be disappointed.
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