vir·tu·o·sic

Currently, I'm reading the book 'The Code Book' by Simon Singh. Written in a very gripping style, it gives you a very good history of how cryptography evolved and what it might be in the future. It includes ancient ciphers to recent ones and also touches upon Quantum cryptography.

One side-benefit that this book offers is the realization that how knowledge of varying subjects can give solutions to problems that initially seemed unsolvable or very hard. As an example, when describing frequency analysis as a way of cryptanalysis, the use of statistics came in very handy to decode certain type of ciphers.

The book also has some encrypted messages at the back that you can play with and decrypt using the techniques given in the book.

This book will be added to the book club (see link in sidebar) soon.