The best (and maybe the worst)

 
PGP: Pretty Good Privacy. Simson Garfinkel. O'Reilly and Associates, San Francisco, 1995.
The best history of public key cryptography, and particularly of Phil Zimmerman's underdog battle with RSA Data Security Inc., you're ever likely to find.

This topic isn't so dry as some people imagine. Public key cryptography is the magic art of using non-secret keys to encrypt data so securely almost no one will ever break it for many years to come. Garfinkel gracefully explains how it works, outlines the short history of the art and introduces the hard-ball politics involved.

Phil Zimmerman made the powerful art of public keys freely available to everyone in the world with the publication of PGP v. 1.0 in 1991. This event horrified government agencies fighting to maintain their edge in eavesdropping on messages from criminals, suspects and foreign agents and governments. In its short history, PGP has gone through a large number of transformations, stewards and standards.

PGP (and its offspring, Gnu Privacy Guard) use strong ciphers coupled with powerful public keys that provide encryption strong enough for government agencies and financial institutions. Still, it remains the everyday Web citizen's best tool for maintaining privacy.

Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, 2nd Edition. Bruce Schneier. John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1996.
The Bible. Schneier is much admired on the 'Net and in the cryptography community for his support of Open Source and for his clear and nimble writing style. A prolific writer, Schneier publishes the monthly Crypto-gram email letter, contributes frequently to Dr. Dobb's Journal and other publications and manages to write a book now and then.

Applied Cryptography is about the best compendium there is of cryptography ciphers and techniques in the mid 1990's. Some of the math may be dense, but it's all here -- how the ciphers and keys work, right down to the source code you can compile, use and play with on your own computer. If this sounds too technical, then at least buy the book for its encyclopedic listing of ciphers and algorithms and Schneier's evaluations of them.

With a new millennium and new ciphers competing for dominance (Schneier's own Twofish block cipher among them) it's about time Bruce published a third edition of this tome.

Web Client Programming. Clinton Wong. O'Reilly and Associates, San Francisco, 1997.
This is a great programming book, and it's too bad O'Reilly let it go out of print. Though it is out of print, Amazon will will try to find it used for you. If you do see a used copy, buy it!

Wong steps you through the HTTP protocol and gives you plenty of examples of Perl code. He doesn't cover everything, but there's enough here to get you started. And once started, you can probably learn the rest on your own.

The book is heavily focused on the LWP library module by Gisle Aas and Martijn Koster. Wong does give you an example of Perl code that does HTTP downloads without using LWP, but there are no examples using other languages.

LWP cookbook
This is a text file that comes free with the LWP library. Most of what Wong left out of his book, you'll probably find here. After you finish the Wong book, use this.

Perl 5 Interactive Course. Jon Orwant. Waite Group Press, 1997.
This book is essential to your Perl library. Orwant is one of the "inner circle" of Perl gurus who help shape the language's growth. I like the book for three reasons: It's lucid and easy to follow, unlike other famous Perl books; it includes an online, interactive course that gives you some accreditation of sorts (well, you do get a certificate) from Marquette University; when you're finished it's the best Perl reference I know. Whatever you're looking for, you're most certain to find it easily in this book. My copy is in tatters, I use it so much.

Mastering Regular Expressions. Jeffrey E.F. Friedl. O'Reilly and Associates, San Francisco, 1997.
Not for the novice. Friedl goes into the theory and practice of the two main regex engines: Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) and Non-deterministic Finite Automaton (NFA). Friedl, who's day job is in Japan and requires him to be bilingual in English and Japanese, is something of an obsessive on language and string parsing. This is a good thing, but don't buy this book unless you're a little obsessive yourself.

However, if you do have the time and energy to devote to it, Friedl intensely covers the regex landscape in Perl, Tcl, awk, sed, emacs, Python and other technologies.

Java Examples in a Nutshell. David Flanagan. O'Reilly and Associates, San Francisco, 1998.
This is the companion book to Flanagans' Java in a Nutshell, which is really an excellent Java reference books. But of the two books, Examples is definitely the more valuable. It has gobs of code examples -- more than any standard documentation ever will. And the examples do far more to explain how to do things in Java.

If you're learning Java, get this book.







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