Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice (6th Edition) 6th Edition

This book is a great read, it breaks down the examples and is almost an easy read because it explains alot. However, other resources would need to be used in order to understand again algorithms and discrete math, which both I am not very fond of. Used this book for my class, the review examples are very helpful at the end of the chapters and can be found on online from previous versions of the book. Though I am only on chapter 4 so far, seems things are going well.

Very good book. I have been reading this book as a text book in my college years and also at graduate school. It is an excellent reference book for anyone in the security field

A lot of this course is crypto, so if you are looking for crypto, this is a great book. And as a textbook it has exercises after every chapter. Make sure you are buying the most current edition, as that changes rapidly (annually)

It has all mathematical backgrounds for understanding every algorithms. it covers almost all the state-of-art algorithms available. It gives you insights into what can be done in future.

He has a tendency to just drop a bunch of equations on you without really explaining in detail why things are the way they are. Also, the diagrams don't really help explain the text-the diagrams can be rather confusingly drawn.

The book I received from rental from amazon was vandalized. Heavily written and highlighter. It was annoying. The book itself was okay, but glazed over everything. Needs to go into better detail and have more examples and break tons down to follow better

Excellent book with explicit expalanations

Stallings does a good job explaining complicated cryptography, but he sometimes assumes a certain level of mathematical ability. His favorite phrase seems to be "...it follows that...". He uses that phrase to skip some of the mathematics and assumes it's second nature to the reader. For me, this was not always the case. These assumptions make following the logical train of thought difficult at times. As a textbook, it's good, however, for learning cryptography outside of a classroom setting, there are better alternatives.