mixedmath

How do you begin to learn a technical subject?

My first experience in "programming" was following a semi-tutorial on how to patch the Starcraft exe in order to make it understand replays from previous versions. I was about 10, and I cobbled together my understanding from internet mailing lists and chatrooms. The documentation was awful and the original description was flawed, and to make it worse, I didn't know anything about any sort of programming yet. But I trawled these lists and chatroom logs and made it work, and learned a few things. Each time Starcraft was updated, the old replay system broke completely and it was necessary to make some changes, and I got pretty good at figuring out what changes were necessary and how to perform these patches.

On the other hand, my first formal experience in programming was taking a course at Georgia Tech many years later, in which a typical activity would revolve around an exciting topic like concatenating two strings or understanding object polymorphism. These were dry topics presented to us dryly, but I knew that I wanted to understand what was going on and so I suffered the straight-faced-ness of the class and used the course as an opportunity to build some technical depth.

Now I recognize that these two approaches cover most first experiences learning a technical subject: a motivated survey versus monographic study. At the heart of the distinction is a decision to view and alight on many topics (but not delving deeply in most) or to spend as much time as is necessary to understand completely each topic (and hence to not touch too many different topics). Each has their place, but each draws a very different crowd.

The book Cracking Codes with Python: An Introduction to Building and Breaking Ciphers by Al Sweigart^{1 1} Side note: this is the fifth book I've been asked to review, and by far the most approachable is very much a motivated flight through various topics in programming and cryptography, and not at all a deep technical study of any individual topic. A more accurate (though admittedly less beckoning) title might be An Introduction to Programming Concepts Through Building and Breaking Ciphers in Python. The main goal is to promote programmatical thinking by exploring basic ciphers, and the medium happens to be python.

But ciphers are cool. And breaking them is cool. And if you think you might want to learn something about programming and you might want to learn something about ciphers, then this is a great book to read.

Sweigart has a knack for writing approachable descriptions of what's going on without delving into too many details. In fact, in some sense Sweigart has already written this book before: his other books Automate the Boring Stuff with Python and Invent your own Computer Games with Python are similarly survey material using python as the medium, though with different motivating topics.

Each chapter of this book is centered around exploring a different aspect of a cipher, and introduces additional programming topics to do so. For example, one chapter introduces the classic Caesar cipher, as well as the "if", "else", and "elif" conditionals (and a few other python functions). Another chapter introduces brute-force breaking the Caesar cipher (as well as string formatting in python).

In each chapter, Sweigart begins by giving a high-level overview of the topics in that chapter, followed by python code which accomplishes the goal of the chapter, followed by a detailed description of what each block of code accomplishes. Readers get to see fully written code that does nontrivial things very quickly, but on the other hand the onus of code generation is entirely on the book and readers may have trouble adapting the concepts to other programming tasks. (But remember, this is more survey, less technical description). Further, Sweigart uses a number of good practices in his code that implicitly encourages good programming behaviors: modules are written with many well-named functions and well-named variables, and sufficiently modularly that earlier modules are imported and reused later.

But this book is not without faults. As with any survey material, one can always disagree on what topics are or are not included. The book covers five classical ciphers (Caesar, transposition, substitution, Vigenere, and affine) and one modern cipher (textbook-RSA), as well as the write-backwards cipher (to introduce python concepts) and the one-time-pad (presented oddly as a Vigenere cipher whose key is the same length as the message). For some unknown reason, Sweigart chooses to refer to RSA almost everywhere as "the public key cipher", which I find both misleading (there are other public key ciphers) and giving insufficient attribution (the cipher is implemented in chapter 24, but "RSA" appears only once as a footnote in that chapter. Hopefully the reader was paying lots of attention, as otherwise it would be rather hard to find out more about it).

Further, the choice of python topics (and their order) is sometimes odd. In truth, this book is almost language agnostic and one could very easily adapt the presentation to any other scripting language, such as C.

In summary, this book is an excellent resource for the complete beginner who wants to learn something about programming and wants to learn something about ciphers. After reading this book, the reader will be a mid-beginner student of python (knee-deep is apt) and well-versed in classical ciphers. Should the reader feel inspired to learn more python, then he or she would probably feel comfortable diving into a tutorial or reference for their area of interest (like Full Stack Python if interested in web dev, or Python for Data Analysis if interested in data science). Or he or she might dive into a more complete monograph like Dive into Python or the monolithic Learn Python. Many fundamental topics (such as classes and objects, list comprehensions, data structures or algorithms) are not covered, and so "advanced" python resources would not be appropriate.

Further, should the reader feel inspired to learn more about cryptography, then I recommend that he or she consider Cryptanalysis by Gaines, which is a fun book aimed at diving deeper into classical pre-computer ciphers, or the slightly heavier but still fun resource would "Codebreakers" by Kahn. For much further cryptography, it's necessary to develop a bit of mathematical maturity, which is its own hurdle.

This book is not appropriate for everyone. An experienced python programmer could read this book in an hour, skipping the various descriptions of how python works along the way. An experienced programmer who doesn't know python could similarly read this book in a lazy afternoon. Both would probably do better reading either a more advanced overview of either cryptography or python, based on what originally drew them to the book.

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