Rating: 

There's no better first book on cryptography for a programmer to buy.

You get a great deal of exposure to an important facet of network security through this little gem. It's friendly and to the point.

The Java API is excellent--but the idea of cryptography is little odd to the everyday web or network application programmer. Having someone to kindly bridge the crypto-what-ja-ma-call-its to a world of how-do-i-wrap-it-around-my-web-or-mail-service is simply priceless. There's NO silly cryptomath (because only those cryptoexperts get the math anyway) but instead it's filled with no-nonsense coverage of how each and every common crypto engine and crypto-"protocol" takes your stream of data and converts them to cryptograms. If you always like to learn as MUCH as you could about a particular computational wonder tool before tackling a project without turning your brain to mush with research mathematics--you'll like this book.

It's just one of those books I wished I read a lot earlier so I won't have an excuse to avoid APIs that exposes applied cryptography to network applications all these years. I highly recommend this book before you head on to the math of it.

It's too bad the SSL/TLS API for Java never made it into this first edition (it did make it into O'Reilly's latest Java network programming book though).

Any one know of a book just like this one but for another language like C or Perl? With a book like this you don't need to explain it all over again--but illustration and snippets of code showing how to use the various APIs in other languages would be useful. I think if the author is willing to dabble into all of these issues and give away his findings on a book website it will be just AWESOME! A second edition of said book with all of these issues covered would be just grand too :-)