Modern Cryptography: Theory and Practice

Rating:
Summary: Good reference, poorly edited
Review: What's great about Mao's book is that so many aspects of cryptography are covered in an approachable manner and with many good examples.
What's not so great about Mao's book is that it is chock full of errors. There are many mathematical typos. But what really kills this book for me are the ridiculous number of English mistakes - on average about two or three per page. Most mistakes are simple grammatical mistakes that can be re-parsed by the reader on the fly. However, there are more serious errors that make it very difficult to understand the meaning of significant passages and concepts.
Given Mao's refreshing conversational style it's a real shame that Prentice Hall couldn't come up with some decent editing. Hopefully a second edition will fix this.