> In particular, the long introductions that would start with history.
I can feel this. I studied cryptography at University. There was a lot of great things studied, but the first several weeks were a discussion Enigma, the war, and a life story of Alan Turing. Throw in a lesson about ancient Rome and the use of a Ceasar cipher and I was pretty bored of the course before we did any real work.
To anyone with a strong math background and not particularly interested in the history: maybe try Stanford’s Intro to Cryptography by Dan Boneh? I took it way back when I was an undergrad there studying math and physics, and IIRC it got into the math very quickly (not that I didn’t enjoy the historical context personally). It’s been available as a highly-rated MOOC for a while: https://www.coursera.org/learn/crypto
For me that was my favourite part. I felt really connected to history and made cryptography feel very applicable unlike other subjects where usually only the abstractions and ideas are discussed.
I'm sorry, this view feels pretty misguided. Without such historical background you are bound to repeat mistakes all over again. I can't even count how often I meet somebody who wants to roll some "simple cipher" by xoring a periodically repeated "password" over a file, or at every position or so. Or writes a blog post about this and then has the deep insight that this is called "caesar cipher, you should look it up, it's fun" or some nonsense. Those are the seriously uneducated. Maybe coming from a high school student, sure. But not from an actual professional.
With a university degree in this you should be better than that. You should be curious about the history of your field and learn the context. Everybody who is not signals to me that they actually just want to hack something without a deep understanding, and then move on.
I can feel this. I studied cryptography at University. There was a lot of great things studied, but the first several weeks were a discussion Enigma, the war, and a life story of Alan Turing. Throw in a lesson about ancient Rome and the use of a Ceasar cipher and I was pretty bored of the course before we did any real work.
I'll be buying this book.