The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet

"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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