The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-breaking

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When you think of spies and secret agents, you might think of lots of things; nifty gadgets, foreign travel, dangerous missiles, fast cars and being shaken but not stirred. You probably wouldn't think of mathematics. But you should. I've read several books about code-breaking during World War II, and I even make a trek up to Bletchley Park while visiting London a few years ago. So I guess you could say I've got an abiding interest in this subject. This is a wonderfully readable and impressive book, encompassing all the major Allied efforts to decode German and Japanese codes. Interestingly, some of this information would probably still be secret had not British Government lifted the Official Secrets Act regarding WWII decoding efforts in 1974 -- they did so only after Americans revealed their part in the effort. Narrator: Did you know? The German encryption machine, was called the Enigma. It had one hundred and three billion trillion possible settings for encoding messages. For much of the war it was thought to be unbreakable. However, Enigma encryption had fatal flaws. A letter could not be encrypted as itself and multiple letters could not be encoded with the same letter. So A couldn't be encoded as A, nor could A be encoded as both B and C at the same time.

The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-breaking

As a long-time writer and speaker on codes and ciphers, Elonka Dunin knows her stuff. Together with co-author Klaus Schmeh, she put together a practical and engaging guide to codes and ciphers that have been used throughout the last several centuries, long before computers were available to aid the process. As a major hint to would-be codebreakers, the story behind the code is often as important and compelling as a code itself, and Dunin and Schmeh never fail to deliver with each code they examine. Enjoy, and happy codebreaking! Letter sent by Mary Queen of Scots to her co-conspirator Anthony Babington. Every symbol stands for a letter of the alphabet.

Lessons for code-breakers

This is a Typex machine, which was used to code and decode all the secret messages which we received. Book ciphers have been used frequently both for real secrecy as well as in popular culture for entertainment. This practical guide to breaking codes and solving cryptograms by two world experts, Elonka Dunin and Klaus Schmeh, describes the most common encryption techniques along with methods to detect and break them. It fills a gap left by outdated or very basic-level books.

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Q'. The graph below shows the average frequency of letters in English. To compile the information, people looked through thousands and thousands of books, magazines and newspapers, and counted the number of times each letter came up. The crypto explorer’s Baedeker travel guide. It introduces you to a variety of both famous and lesser known cryptograms throughout time, while it guides you carefully through the various processes of unraveling their secrets.A.J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically and Puzzled: A Deep Dive into riddles, brainteasers, and conundrums of all kinds