// Comparison

Codebreaking vs The Code Book: Which Should You Read?

Two cybersecurity books on Cryptography, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.

Beginner

4/52023

Codebreaking

A Practical Guide

Elonka Dunin, Klaus Schmeh

Elonka Dunin and Klaus Schmeh teach classical cryptanalysis through real, unsolved ciphers, from 19th-century newspaper personal ads to wartime telegrams, using free tools like CrypTool 2.

Beginner

5/51999

The Code Book

The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

Simon Singh

A narrative history of cryptography from Caesar ciphers to public-key, told through the people and the wars that turned on broken codes. Still the best on-ramp to why crypto matters.

Read this if

Hobbyist codebreakers and security people who want the historical and puzzle-solving side of cryptography, not the mathematical theory. Dunin maintains the web's reference list of unsolved ciphers and Schmeh is the most-published cryptology author alive, so the case studies are the real, still-open ones.

Anyone curious how secrecy actually works and why it mattered, students, career-changers, defenders who want the history their tools inherit.

Skip this if

Readers who want modern applied cryptography, algorithm design, or anything about securing systems; this is classical/historical cipher-breaking (substitution, polyalphabetic, transposition), not AES or TLS. Pair with Serious Cryptography or Cryptography Engineering for that side.

Engineers who want working crypto. This is history and intuition, not a reference, skip it if you need implementation detail or modern protocol specifics.

Key takeaways

Teaches cryptanalysis on real, unsolved historical ciphers rather than textbook exercises, which keeps the puzzle-solving stakes genuine.
CrypTool 2 and other free software get hands-on coverage, so the skills transfer to actually attacking a ciphertext, not just reading about it.
Several of the book's case studies remain unsolved mysteries today; readers are explicitly invited to take a crack at them.

Most ciphers fall not to brute force but to human pattern and procedural sloppiness.
Breaking Enigma was an industrial, organizational effort, not a lone-genius moment.
Public-key cryptography solved the key-distribution problem that had constrained secrecy for millennia.

How they compare

We rate The Code Book higher (5/5 against 4/5 for Codebreaking). For most readers, that means The Code Book is the primary pick and Codebreaking is a useful follow-up.

Both books target beginner-level readers, so the choice is about topic, not difficulty.

Codebreaking and The Code Book both cover Cryptography, History, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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