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Comment by _corbett | Hacker News Reader

awesome, I'm reading Applied Cryptography and this will be a good supplement. The MIT OCW course doesn't have a lot of resources http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

Does anyone know from the AI course the quality of the lectures & videos?

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Applied Cryptography, no matter what Matthew Green may have to say about it, is a terrible book to learn cryptography from. I highly recommend you burn it and instead pick up a copy of Practical Cryptography (or Cryptography Engineering, which is the exact same book).

The mark of a good book on a security topic is, you can read it "upside down" and learn how to break things instead of build them.

Frustratingly, there's more than one applied cryptography. There's (obviously) Schneier's book, and then there's this:

(http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/)

Menezes is "Handbook Of Applied Cryptography", but this was actually a sore point with Schneier back in '98 (I feel like I listened to him complain about it in a bar at Usenix Security).

In any case, get Practical Cryptography.

Why is Applied Cryptography a terrible book?

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=by%3Atptace...

More specifically, the one comment in that search that provides rationale: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377187

I disagree that it's the only comment with a rationale, but it's a fine example. Writing the same thing about the same subjects over and over again is tiresome, isn't it?

(Thank you for taking the time to pick one out though).

From the horse's mouth:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_cult_of_sc...

The AI class is ok, but the lack of programming assignment really impede learning. On the other hand the ML class is great, even the web site is better.

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