I'm current enrolled in the Oregon State post-bacc CS degree program and I've heard great things about the class that this book is written for. Hopefully by the time I get around to my electives the professor is still teaching this class.

If you want to see the syllabus for the class it's available here: https://oregonstate.instructure.com/courses/1761126/assignme...

It's interesting to compare this table of contents with the TOC by Dan Boneh and Victor Shoup which was updated in January 2020.

"A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography" https://toc.cryptobook.us/

Like this one, their book can be downloaded too.

It's often good to have different POV when learning cryptography. These seem to complement each other nicely, with Boneh and Shoup being more advanced, and more complete in many areas.

Has anyone read this text and can comment on how good it is? I've been wanting to learn more about cryptography as a SWE who's mostly only done traditional web apps/microservices.

Unrelated to the article. If you want to play with various algorithms in your browser you can go here:

https://github.com/gchq/cyberchef

I can recommend the book Serious Cryptography published by nostarch press as a solid source

Serious cryptography is one of the best textbooks I have ever read.

I agree. Jp does a good job in that book. It’s very accessible yet taught me so much.

Covers modern stuff like ECC too, which this book doesn’t seem to.

This is great! I'm bookmarking it, I'll probably use some stuff in my sequel to the "Practical Cryptography" course I just released: https://qvault.io/practical-cryptography/

I would recommend this book that was posted on HN before and is much more applied: https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography?a_aid=...

I'm wondering this too. If I want to specialize in something, what subfield has the most ROI?

- Distributed systems

- ML/AI

- Crypto

When I first read this, I had the (snarky! unfiltered!) thought, "Well why dontcha go Google it? That's not exactly a philosophical question."

But that got me thinking... what if it was a philosophical question, the kind of question that prompts responses that tell you what it's really like to work in [x].

HN, what's it really like to work in [Distributed systems, ML/AI, Crypto]?

As someone with domain expertise in both distributed systems and crypto, I'll say "not crypto"; it's relatively well-understood and most of the people who get value out of it don't need to work on it, they can just use what already exists. By comparison, one needs detailed knowledge of distributed systems to make effective use of them, so expertise has broader value. I suspect ML/AI is similar to distributed systems in impact and value, maybe with broader market applicability, but I don't know as much about it in practice.

There is a different metric too: level of shame vs level of fame when you screw up / achieve something.

- distributed systems? Fame on achievement: not much, shame on failure: not much.

- ML/AI? Fame: crazy amount, shame: not much

- Crypto? Fame: not much, shame: you better change industry :-D

/s

It can change rapidly. I’d suggest follow which interests you most.

Cryptography is super fun =)

The things you can do with it are utterly mind-bending, plus you can prove to yourself that things are correct (unlike ML/AI =P)

I love this site a lot. The fun thing is that, the missing of TLS connection will allow people to tamper this site which teaches people how to prevent tampering :)

It does support TLS, just doesn't redirect.

https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~rosulekm/crypto/

>In particular, never ever write(x^a)(x^b)=x^ab. If you write this, your cryptography instructor will realize that life is too short, immediately resign from teaching, and join a traveling circus. But not before changing your grade in the course to a zero.

Ha! Love it.

Is it weird that I feel satisfied whenever I hear or read something that sounds like something I would say?

Slightly unrelated: Can we have the cake and eat too in the case of choosing e-book formats for academic e-books? I mean to combine the adaptiveness of epub and the advanced scientific notation and plotting possible with pdf.

Org mode has an extension export to epub from markup with latex notations.

https://github.com/syohex/org-epub

Probably markdown/pandoc has similar options.

I'm currently taking a graduate class in Applied Cryptography and will definitely use this as another resource for reference. Love that they've opened it up and made it free.