The Book Review Column1 by William Gasarch Dept of Computer Science Univ. of MD at College Park College Park, MD, 20742 email:
[email protected] Slight change in information given: in the past I have provided price and ISBN numbers of books. The notion of price is ill-defined: the website www.bestbookbuys.com gives a range of prices from place to purchase books on the web. (amazon.com is usually not the cheapest, and its usually not even close.). Providing ISBN numbers is also not needed in this electronic age where such information is available at the touch of a button. If the price is notable{ either rather high or rather low, this might be mentioned in the review. Welcome to the Book Reviews Column. We hope to bring you at least two reviews of books every month. In this column five books are reviewed. 1. The Codebreakers: The story of secret writing , by David Kahn reviewed by William Gasarch. This is a rather complete history of crypto up to World War II. The key question for us is, should someone doing research in cryptography read this book? 2. The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography , by Simon Singh. This book review originally appeared in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, March 2000, and is reprinted here with permission. Review by Jim Reeds. This is a recent book on the history of crypto that is quite popular. But is it accurate? Read the review to find out. 3. DNA Based Computers V (Proceedings of a Dimacs Workshop) edited by Eric Winfree and David K.