Book details of 'The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing'

Title	The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing
Author(s)	David Kahn
ISBN	0684831309
Language	English
Published	December 1996
Publisher	Scribner

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Amazon.com info for The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing

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virtualbookcase.com score: 5.0   Vote for this book

The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing':

Reviewer Koos van den Hout wrote:
A very complete book on the history of and the theory behind cryptology, and all the attempts in history to break codes, including decrypting ancient languages (not really ment as a code, but a code to modern day researchers anyway). For me, the mathematics got a bit too hard sometimes, but skipping those bits still allowed me to follow the trail of the history throughout the book. The book opens with the story of the cracking of the 'Magic' code as used by the Japanese in the beginning of the second world war. This is a good opener to set the stage for the rest of the book, both in how hard it can be to crack codes and how much of an influence codecracking has been on history. The book goes on with a history of cryptography and codebreaking. From 1900 BC via European history (the middle ages) and American history (the civil war) up until the second world war. The second world war gets a lot of extra (and deserved) attention because of the rapid development in both cryptology and code-breaking. The second half of the 20th century gets its deserved attention because of the cold war (both the development of the NSA and its Soviet Russian counterpart are described) and recent developments in computer-assisted cryptology now usable by the common man. Diversions are also followed like the attempts to find the hidden messages within the works by Shakespeare and the search for signs of extra-terrestrial life. The author does report in a good style about these without being prejudiced, which I applaud. All in all a good book. No light reading for a rainy Sunday afternoon, but a good book to read for someone who is interested in these matters.
Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
"Few false ideas have more firmly gripped the minds of so many intelligent men than the one that, if they just tried, they could invent a cipher that no one could break," writes David Kahn in this massive (almost 1,200 pages) volume. Most of The Codebreakers focuses on the 20th century, especially World War II. But its reach is long. Kahn traces cryptology's origins to the advent of writing. It seems that as soon as people learned how to record their thoughts, they tried to figure out ways of keeping them hidden. Kahn covers everything from the theory of ciphering to the search for "messages" from outer space. He concludes with a few thoughts about encryption on the Internet.
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