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Title: terrific book
Review: The book is absolutely brilliantly written. It has lots of real-life stories starting with a story of the Mary Queen of Scots who was beheaded for using too a weak cipher. Between those stories author explains actual ciphers starting from Julius Caesar's and methods to crack them in the terms understandable by a pedestrian. I tried to explain the simplest ones to my 7-year old and he's got them. Meantime, the appendix J contains concise and clear enough description of the strongest existing RSA algorithm, clear enough to reproduce it. Highly recommend for those interested in history, history of science, math, spy stories, history of computers - this book combines it all.
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