// Comparison

Crypto Dictionary vs Serious Cryptography: 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

4/52021

Crypto Dictionary

500 Tasty Tidbits for the Curious Cryptographer

Jean-Philippe Aumasson

Jean-Philippe Aumasson's alphabetical, opinionated reference on cryptographic terms, primitives, attacks and folklore. Snack-format companion to Serious Cryptography.

Intermediate

5/52024

Serious Cryptography

A Practical Introduction to Modern Encryption

Jean-Philippe Aumasson

Jean-Philippe Aumasson's working introduction to modern cryptography, written for engineers who need both intuition and enough mathematical depth to evaluate the choices a library is making for them.

Read this if

Anyone who reads cryptography papers, blog posts, or CTF write-ups and keeps hitting half-remembered terms. Keep it on your desk: 500 entries, each a paragraph or two, alphabetical, opinionated. The crypto reference you'll actually use.

Engineers who already know what crypto to use and want to understand why it works at the primitive level. The middle book in the modern crypto stack: deeper than Real-World Cryptography, shallower than the academic textbooks.

Skip this if

Readers wanting a textbook flow or systematic foundation. The book is a dictionary by design; pair with Real-World Cryptography (Wong) or Serious Cryptography (Aumasson) for sequential learning.

Beginners or readers who haven't yet decided which primitives to use; start with Wong first. Also wrong for cryptography researchers who need formal proofs.

Key takeaways

Aumasson's opinionated entries ("don't use", "use this instead", "avoid for this reason") condense decades of practitioner judgment into one-paragraph verdicts.
Term coverage spans symmetric, asymmetric, hash, post-quantum, side-channel, and crypto-folklore; few references this small are this comprehensive.
The book's value compounds over time: every paper or write-up sends you back to it.

Modern primitives can be understood by engineers, given the right framing — Aumasson's choice to bound the math is the book's defining design decision.
The 2nd edition (2024) covers post-quantum cryptography (Kyber, Dilithium, SPHINCS+) at the depth a deploying engineer actually needs.
The chapters on hash-function attacks (length extension, multi-collisions) are the clearest in print and explain why half of the production bugs in HMAC-adjacent code happen.

How they compare

We rate Serious Cryptography higher (5/5 against 4/5 for Crypto Dictionary). For most readers, that means Serious Cryptography is the primary pick and Crypto Dictionary is a useful follow-up.

Crypto Dictionary is pitched at beginner level. Serious Cryptography is pitched at intermediate level. Read the easier one first if you're not yet comfortable with the topic.

Crypto Dictionary and Serious Cryptography both cover Cryptography, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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