The Code Book by Simon Singh - Academic Review

Abstract

The Code Book is a book by Simon Singh. The book covers the history of codes and how they were broken or left as a mystery. The book does not have an academic flow to it and it gives the reader a sense of how long coded messages has been passed on throughout the years. The author here doesn’t focus mainly on IT and Security personnel but to any audience. The concepts that are brought up are presented in the book are straight forward and easy to grasp

Background & Overview

Simon Singh is a writer, journalist and presenter who specialises in science and mathematics. He has a PhD in particle physics. He is also the author of the famous science book entitled “Fermat’s Enigma”. His third book that deals with The Simpsons and mathematics. Singh gives a good overall of the history of code making and code breaking and shows the reader the evolution of codes and how they are relevant today.

Review

From the outset of the book’s introduction, Singh’s introduction to what to expect from the book and gives the reader a sense of eagerness to dive into the book and not put it down. He also doesn’t go hard in to the technical part of code making but rather explains to the layman how easy it is to make and how to break it or make an attempt to break it.

Chapter 1 in the book deals with the early plot of Mary of the Scots and her secret code writing of a plot to kill Queen Elizabeth. This showed that her messages where intercepted and her code was broken. This chapter focuses more on the evolution of secret writing as the Singh gives the reader a brief history of the Greeks and Persians and how messages where written on a shaved head, he goes on to mention steganography, cryptography as well as the two branches of cryptography ( transposition and substitution). He went over how cryptanalysis was born and how it would have never came to be if the Arabs society did not have a high level of mathematics, statistics and linguistics. Therefore saying to the user that they needed to have to be highly skilled in these and yet he showed examples that would encourage those who aren’t highly skilled in these three subjects to go out and codebreak.

Going on to chapter the two I felt that the book lost some flair that the introduction had in keeping the reader enthralled in learning about the history of code making and breaking, but it became rather dull as the dates jumped from one place to another. Though this chapter brought about how the Vigenère code was broken which once again lit up a bit of enthusiasm in me to press on and this turned out fruitful as the next two chapters became increasingly enthralling

Chapter 3 was based around Enigma. Chapter 3 started off by stating that secret writing was about to change from hand written to that of being made by machines. This chapter showed the reader how the cipher disc mentioned in the previous chapter was developed in to an electrical version by Arthur Scherbius which was called Enigma. A detailed process of how the machine was made was given to the reader and allowed one to understand how important this piece of machinery is in the history of cryptography. The way the author gave the description of the Enigma shows us that the Germans didn’t bother if the machine fell into enemy hands as it was a difficult machine to decrypt as the message initial setting was dictated by a codebook which was hard for enemies to gain. The Enigma machine was shown to play an important role in the German’s winning the First World War.