The codebreakers

Alternate Titles

• Story of secret writing.

Description

David Kahn's book is probably the best known and most thorough history of codes and ciphers, cryptography, and cryptanalysis ever written. It covers the development and use of secret writing from ancient times up to the present day. A must read for anyone who is interested in this fascinating field.

Description

Man has created codes to keep secrets and has broken codes to learn those secrets since the time of the Pharaohs. For 4,000 years, fierce battles have been waged between codemakers and codebreakers, and the story of these battles is civilization's secret history, the hidden account of how wars were won and lost, diplomatic intrigues foiled, business secrets stolen, governments ruined, computers hacked. From the XYZ Affair to the Dreyfus Affair, from the Gallic War to the Persian Gulf, from Druidic runes and the kaballah to outer space, from the Zimmermann telegram to Enigma to the Manhattan Project, codebreaking has shaped the course of human events to an extent beyond any easy reckoning. Once a government monopoly, cryptology today touches everybody. It secures the Internet, keeps e-mail private, maintains the integrity of cash machine transactions, and scrambles TV signals on unpaid-for channels. David Kahn's The Codebreakers takes the measure of what codes and codebreaking have meant in human history in a single comprehensive account, astonishing in its scope and enthralling in its execution. Hailed upon first publication as a book likely to become the definitive work of its kind, The Codebreakers has more than lived up to that prediction: it remains unsurpassed. With a brilliant new chapter that makes use of previously classified documents to bring the book thoroughly up to date, and to explore the myriad ways computer codes and their hackers are changing all of our lives, The Codebreakers is the skeleton key to a thousand thrilling true stories of intrigue, mystery, and adventure. It is a masterpiece of the historian's art.

Subjects

Other Editions

• The codebreakers: the story of secret writingScribner1996-01-01
• The codebreakersMacmillan1967-01-01
• The codebreakersWeidenfeld and Nicolson1967-01-01
• The codebreakersMacmillan1967-01-01
• The codebreakersNew American Library1973-01-01
• The codebreakersWeidenfeld and Nicolson1974-01-01