// Comparison
Cult of the Dead Cow vs The Code Book: Which Should You Read?
Two cybersecurity books on History, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.
How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
Joseph Menn
Joseph Menn's history of cDc — the Texas-rooted hacking collective that coined 'hacktivism', shipped Back Orifice, and threaded its way through three decades of the security industry's coming-of-age.
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.
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Key takeaways
- The hacker-to-defender arc that the security industry now runs on was largely socialized inside groups like cDc in the 1990s.
- The book's policy thread — that disclosure and ethics were debates, not assumptions — is its most underrated half.
- Several still-active companies and government roles trace directly to people who first met on cDc message boards; the genealogy chart is the book's quiet thesis.
- 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 Cult of the Dead Cow). For most readers, that means The Code Book is the primary pick and Cult of the Dead Cow is a useful follow-up.
Both books target beginner-level readers, so the choice is about topic, not difficulty.
Cult of the Dead Cow and The Code Book both cover History, Narrative, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.