Sorry, you're right, I should have been less clinical about this. Practical Cryptography (which is essentially the exact same book by the same authors) was also the first cryptography book that clicked in any meaningful way for me, and really lit me up about the prospect of finding vulnerabilities in cryptosystems.

I would actively recommend against using it as a guide in 2025. But you're not crazy to have liked it before. Funny enough, 12 years ago, I wrote a blog post about this:

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/applied-practical-cry...