This “Manga Guide to…” series is fantastic. This is another solid entry worthy of your time and attention, provided the subject matter is of interest for any reason. While none of the entries in the series could or is intended to replace a textbook, they are all fantastic supplementary materials to any study of the academic topics covered.
The Manga Guide to Cryptography tackles all of the main points you would expect of an academic introduction to the topic. It does so with clarity, with precision, and surrounds the academic details with an enjoyable narrative that makes the information much easier to absorb. In fact, I would go so far as to say the story makes the subject matter move from difficult, but interesting, to enjoyable. This is done by giving a context to the subject matter that the reader can relate to.
Ruka Maguro is the younger sister of Jun Meguro, who is a police inspector. She tags along with him as he investigates a case of art theft from a supposedly secure museum. As information security is discussed during the investigation they are joined by Rio Yoneda, a news reporter, who points out the flaws in the first cryptographic cipher being used to protect the location of the now-stolen masterpiece. This is all in the first five pages.
From here, the story develops (I won’t spoil the plot any further). Along the way, the book covers the foundations of encryption and classic ciphers, various algorithms such as symmetric-key and public-key and multiple implementations and details for each, and finally a number of practical applications of encryption. The book will not teach you how to become an elite hacker (1337 hax0r, either), but will give you a solid introduction to a wide breadth of foundation information in the topic. It does so with enough clarity and precision to help you understand what the various ciphers, algorithms, and implementations are and how they are currently or previously used along with enough understanding to help you do further research on any that interest you deeply.
This book won’t replace a textbook and doing your homework, but it has a very strong chance of helping you overcome the fear and intimidation that are often associated with these complex topics. Like the other titles in this series, I recommend this book highly.
It seems that the publisher now prevents hotlinking of images. I don’t blame them, but that is why there is only one link to the book (in my first reference to the title) and not two (one from an image of the cover).
Disclosure: I was given my copy of this book by the publisher as a review copy.