Cryptography: The Science of Secret Writing

This book is a fantastic introduction to the art and science of Cryptography. It shows you in detail various ciphers used throughout history, and how to decipher them. Then it has a problem solving section that starts small and builds until you are trying to solve incredibly complex problems. It truly challenges and expands the mind. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning cryptography.

This book provides a very fascinating look at substitution and transposition ciphers of the WWII era. It provides detailed instructions on how each cipher is implemented, and provides a chapter on the cryptanalysis of ciphers as well as a chapter of ciphers for the reader to break. A great text for the study of manual cipher systems.

This is an excellent beginners' book. It has clear demonstrations of early cryptograhpic methods and how they are solved. Each method is accompanied with a set of problems which are well designed to give beginners some decryption skills.