Something that drives me nuts about cryptography books: aimless recitations of theory. Everyone wants to define “Feistel networks”, as if that’s something that’s helpful to know. The theory that’s actually useful — PRPs and PRFs, groups vs fields — almost always absent.
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Replying to @jhripley
I agree about groups and fields! What I think is not useful: pages about Feistel networks and SP networks, or discussions of “s-boxes” and “p-boxes” (w/o any reasoning about what nonlinearity means in practice) as if you’re going to design your own permutation from scratch.
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Before all this, for a complete beginner, it's well worth reading https://www.amazon.com/Fermats-Last-Theorem-Simon-Singh-ebook/dp/B009UKUGXC … . It's a great story and it happens to incidentally explain Galois fields, groups, number theory, and elliptic curves, in stories that are relatable and true enough to be useful later.
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