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4.5/5 Barnes & Noble Language English Publication date September 1999 ISBN 978-1-85702-879-9 OCLC 59459928 | 4.3/5 Goodreads 4.6/5 Flipkart Publisher Fourth Estate Pages 416 pp (first edition) Originally published September 1999 Country United Kingdom Genres Mathematics, Non-fiction | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography is a book by Simon Singh, published in New York in 1999 by Doubleday.
The Code Book describes some illustrative highlights in the history of cryptography, drawn from both of its principal branches, codes and ciphers. Thus the book's title should not be misconstrued as suggesting that the book deals only with codes, and not with ciphers; or that the book is in fact a codebook.
Contents
The Code Book covers diverse historical topics including the Man in the Iron Mask, Arabic cryptography, Charles Babbage, the mechanisation of cryptography, the Enigma machine, and the decryption of Linear B and other ancient writing systems.
Later sections cover the development of public-key cryptography. Some of this material is based on interviews with participants, including persons who worked in secret at GCHQ.
The book concludes with a discussion of "pretty good privacy" (PGP), quantum computing, and quantum cryptography.
The book announced a "cipher challenge" of a series of ten progressively harder ciphers, with a cash prize of £10,000 which has since been won.
The book is not footnoted but has a "Further Reading" section at the end, organized by chapter.