PGP : Pretty Good Privacy

Rating:
Summary: A Pretty Good history of PGP
Review: The first half of "PGP: Pretty Good Privacy" is devoted to cryptography basics and the history behind PGP. It's certainly interesting reading, especially seeing how the relationships among the players developed. If you're interested in this background, then this book is for you.

The second half explains PGP usage and where you can find it online. Unfortunately, a lot of this seems dated -- however, to be fair, the book is over five years old. You'll probably be better off with another resource such as the included documentation.

Rating:
Summary: A Pretty Good history of PGP
Review: The first half of "PGP: Pretty Good Privacy" is devoted to cryptography basics and the history behind PGP. It's certainly interesting reading, especially seeing how the relationships among the players developed. If you're interested in this background, then this book is for you.

The second half explains PGP usage and where you can find it online. Unfortunately, a lot of this seems dated -- however, to be fair, the book is over five years old. You'll probably be better off with another resource such as the included documentation.

Rating:
Summary: A Pretty Good history of PGP
Review: The first half of "PGP: Pretty Good Privacy" is devoted to cryptography basics and the history behind PGP. It's certainly interesting reading, especially seeing how the relationships among the players developed. If you're interested in this background, then this book is for you.

The second half explains PGP usage and where you can find it online. Unfortunately, a lot of this seems dated -- however, to be fair, the book is over five years old. You'll probably be better off with another resource such as the included documentation.

Rating:
Summary: Dated but useful nonetheless
Review: This book gives an excellent account of how encryption came into the hands of non-spooks (and I don't mean Clipper). But what really matters is the legacy information on how encryption works. This information hasn't changed since. It also gives the reader a solid base of understanding of what PGP is doing when you use it.

The book is also quite simple to read, so much so that I felt guilty for "studying" a book that was so easy that I could blow through a chapter in twenty minutes. One final note of importance is that because the book is old (94), it is UNIX-centric, which is quite refreshing in today's environment of applications written exclusively for Windoze.

Rating:
Summary: Dated but useful nonetheless
Review: This book gives an excellent account of how encryption came into the hands of non-spooks (and I don't mean Clipper). But what really matters is the legacy information on how encryption works. This information hasn't changed since. It also gives the reader a solid base of understanding of what PGP is doing when you use it.

The book is also quite simple to read, so much so that I felt guilty for "studying" a book that was so easy that I could blow through a chapter in twenty minutes. One final note of importance is that because the book is old (94), it is UNIX-centric, which is quite refreshing in today's environment of applications written exclusively for Windoze.