The Code Book - Simon Singh

This poor book had to wait a long time on my shelf, and maybe even lost hope about getting read once more. But then I decided to do my bachelor thesis with our cryptography group, and I remembered that I have once bought a book about cryptography. So I dusted off ‘The Code Book’ by Simon Singh.

I am really fond of these kind of books. Books which tell you about the origin story of inventions and discoveries. Where you do not just get the polished textbook version, but also the actual messy process behind the discovery. ‘The Code Book’ delivers this ‘behind-the-scenes’ content for the obscure field of cryptography - and does it decently well in my opinion.

Simon Singh takes us through the ages and gives us some insight into the (cryptographic) problems and creative (or less creative) solutions of the time. Cryptography lends itself quite well for this kind of book because we have the classical arms-race type-of-situation. One time the cryptographers have the advantage, another time the cryptoanalysts have the advantage.

I was impressed how well and detailed Singh explained the ciphers up until the beginning of the 20th century. Especially the explanation of the Enigma machines was pretty illuminating for me. The only part which was not as rich as I would have wished is the part about public key cryptography, which drifted a bit into a philosophy lesson about privacy. Here, I would have preferred some more actual math behind it, but I also understand why Singh left it out.

In terms of the content there were a few surprises. I was aware of ceasar-ciphers and some derivations of it so I expected some background about them. But the book also features a whole chapter on translating lost languages, which was a surprisingly interesting addition. I never thought of applying cryptography to langauge translation but it makes of course completely sense. Also, despite its age (‘The Code Book’ was published around 2000), the book has an introduction to quantum cryptography (and cryptoanalysis) which was a pleasent surprise, especially because I have never touched this topic before and learned new, useful stuff.

I would recommend the book to people who are casually interested in cryptography or computer science in general (which are not too many people). It gives valuable context and is a fun read at times.

rating: 4.0/5.0 recommendability: 4.0/10