Rating: 
Summary: 4 1/2 stars
Review: The chore of every VB programming author is to simplify things so that the dullards can grasp it. He knows this and has succeeded wonderfully. If you want to get your brain around cryptology in a VB sort of way this is the book. Bondi gets 4 1/2 stars, not five, and put a red flag up, for including the 'Regasaurus' program in the CD and touting it up in the book. The program raises a 'Type Mismatch' error as soon as you click the 'Start' button. I went to Bondi's website to download the latest version and the error is still there. Three years since the book has been published. Microsoft has released their own CryptoAPI wrapper (Capicom) so you might want to investigate it before you make a big committment to the WCCO objects. But you will need this book in either case.
Rating: 
Summary: Sample codes doen't work
Review: This book introduced the Wrapper WCCO and code sample of how to use this wrapper (in Appendix). However, when one run the sample code, he will get a lot of error messages. The code is simply not work.
Rating:
Summary: Second to none!
Review: This book was, to put it simply...excellent. The author, Richard Bondi, was very responsive on his bulletin board to any and all questions. The included code was very thorough (only certain aspects of the CryptoAPI were detailed, so review the table of contents first), masterful, and well thought out. The only thing lacking was perhaps more details on implementation, such as key management. Other books, such as Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" (1996) might be a good supplement to delve into details that this book didn't traverse. My company is currently implementing the code from the book (as is!) in an enterprise-wide application. It's that good!
Rating:
Summary: Second to none!
Review: This book was, to put it simply...excellent. The author, Richard Bondi, was very responsive on his bulletin board to any and all questions. The included code was very thorough (only certain aspects of the CryptoAPI were detailed, so review the table of contents first), masterful, and well thought out. The only thing lacking was perhaps more details on implementation, such as key management. Other books, such as Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" (1996) might be a good supplement to delve into details that this book didn't traverse. My company is currently implementing the code from the book (as is!) in an enterprise-wide application. It's that good!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Cryptography Book
Review: This is an excellent book on cryptography in general and especially the Windows CryptoAPI. Cryptography and the CryptoAPI is not for the beginner programmer, but this book does a great job of bringing the CryptoAPI to the Visual Basic programmer. It will save you hours of frustration from attempting to use the CryptoAPI using Microsoft's documentation. It also does an excellent job explaining how to call the Windows API functions in general with a great history and explaination of encryption. I recommend this book to any Visual Basic programmer. I think C++ developers will learn from it also.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Cryptography Book
Review: This is an excellent book on cryptography in general and especially the Windows CryptoAPI. Cryptography and the CryptoAPI is not for the beginner programmer, but this book does a great job of bringing the CryptoAPI to the Visual Basic programmer. It will save you hours of frustration from attempting to use the CryptoAPI using Microsoft's documentation. It also does an excellent job explaining how to call the Windows API functions in general with a great history and explaination of encryption. I recommend this book to any Visual Basic programmer. I think C++ developers will learn from it also.
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