Applied Cryptography

In my opinion, it's as much a "recommended read" as a lot of other so-called "classics": - Rapid Application Development (also by McConnell) - Soul of a New Machine by Kidder - Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks - Programming Pearls by John Bentley - Applied Cryptography (2e) by Bruce Schneier - The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stohl - Structured Computer Organization by Tanenbaum & Todd - Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Gamma, Helm, etc - A New Kind of Science by Wolfram And many more could be added to this list Sure, some of them use acronyms or reference technology that you've either never heard of or has been supplanted But you could [nearly] do a find-and-replace on those "outdated" terms with a "current" term, and the books would [effectively] be up-to-date Don't get hung-up on specific examples - they're just there to illustrate the problem domain

I would recommend Schneier's Cryptography Engineering (or its predecessor) Practical Cryptography over Applied Cryptography, given the question. I agree Applied Cryptography is a very interesting book, but that's because I'm a crypto nerd. For someone looking to improve general software engineering skills, I think the other books do a better job of presenting best practices and the understanding behind them, with a bit less mathematical theory, etc.

This is old, and widely recommended against (e.g. https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/applied-practical-cry... (https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/applied-practical-cryptography/), if you trust tptacek.) It's still a good reference manual for 90's crypto, and very useful if you want to know what mistakes to expect when reviewing crypto code; but you really shouldn't read the book as a handbook unless you have enough knowledge to spot the many, many parts that will lead you astray. (tptacek's page, linked earlier, has a bit of an overview.)

In Security ( or more precisely in Cryptography ) - Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier https://www.schneier.com/books/applied_cryptography/

* "Applied Cryptography" by Bruce Schneier. The first chapters are a great introduction to cryptography, but I found the few following chapters presenting cryptographic protocols mind-blowing. Some of them are so simple yet very clever. * Political economy essays by Frédéric Bastiat ( http://bastiat.org ) were truly enlightening for me.