I had this same textbook for the Crypto course I just completed this semester. It's a very good textbook, in my opinion, as the descriptions and examples are really informative. Usually if I couldn't get the material through my professor's lectures, it was sufficient to look it up in the book. However, we did only briefly touch on cryptographic hashes and only a little on Legendre and Jacobi symbols, and not at all on the elliptic curve and other special topics towards the end of the text, so I can't comment on those.

The book does very good job of talking about different algorithms and concepts, often times with a very brief historical introduction, and includes thorough descriptions of various popular/important attacks of those concepts. In general it's a book I'd recommend for an introduction to cryptography. You also learn a fair introductory bit of number theory which I really enjoyed.

I also met Dr. Washington, one of the co-authors of this book, who was a very pleasant and energetic person who really enjoys the topic of cryptography.

By the way, where are you taking this course?

Thanks everyone for their reviews. Glad to hear this isn't a POS text.

I'm taking this at Millersville University as a once-a-week, 3 hour evening course. I'm a Physics and CS major, and am taking it as an elective to get a Math minor.

With all the NSA and crypto news these days, it sounds like a great time to learn about the fundamentals of crypto. And I'm curious if there will be actual programming involved because to my knowledge, there aren't any prereqs for it, not even an intro to programming course.

I took an Intro to Crypto course offered through my University's Mathematics department and we used that exact text. I'm the kind of person that requires a very good text in order to do well in a course, and the book in question was of high enough quality that I did quite well.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed the Mathematical focus of the course, my particular teacher spent a good deal of the course discussing semi-related Number Theory topics at the expense of introducing some of the more interesting cryptography concepts. That said, we still learned the theory behind the important ones: DES, AES, RSA, and ElGamal, in addition to "classical" forms such as Caesar, Vigenère, and Hill.

Another downside of the course being a Math course and not a CS course: we used Mathematica for all of our "programming" projects, which felt awkward and clunky. I remember coding my solutions in Python first, making sure they were correct, and then translating them to Mathematica after the fact.

Good luck in the course! It'll be hard work, but its absolutely worth the effort.

Mathematica can feel a bit clunky at first, but if Python comes with batteries included, then Mathematica brings its own power plant…

Dr. Washington (one of the authors, I believe the other was a grad student of his) seems to be a really decent guy and cares a lot about teaching. He goes to middle and high schools fairly regularly to introduce kids on these topics.

That concern is reflected in the textbook and his course. It's a very approachable treatment and it seems like a lot of emphasis is placed on making it fun.

The downside to a math listed CS crypto course (as it is where Washington teaches) is that there may be less emphasis on flaws that occur in actual real word implementations. A professor in the CS department also teaches crypto at Maryland and actually uses a different book (one he wrote). My understanding is that there is a bit more attention paid to implementation there, but that's coming second-hand.

Most of Matthew Green's course is avail online http://spar.isi.jhu.edu/~mgreen/650.445/650.445__Main.html