After reading Cryptonomicon (one and a half year ago), I decided I wanted to know a bit more about cryptography and ordered this book. It took a while for me to start it (one and a half years), but it was definitely worth it. Singh takes the reader through the history of cryptography, pretty much from start to near-future and does it in a way anybody can understand. His writing style is very 'chatty', informal, and he often tells fun and engaging little (true) anecdotes and stories involving crytography to illustrate his points. And talking about illustrations, this book is chock full of them! And they are often well chosen and very helpful.

Many times, I wished he would go a bit deeper into the technical details, but I understand this wasn't his aim when he wrote this book. I suppose I'll have to do some further reading for that. For what it is though, I feel this book couldn't do its job better.