If you are interested in cryptography, you might want to check out the Handbook of Applied Cryptography, by Menezes, van Oorschot, and Vanstone (CRC Press). This book is one of the recommended books for the modern cryptography course in the masters program at the University of Washington in Seattle. As of today, it is sold at Amazon.com for $83.95 but you can download it for free in PDF or Postscript format from Alfred Menezes’ Web site.
Alfred Menezes is a professor of mathematics in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo (Canada), where he teaches courses in cryptography, coding theory, finite fields, and discrete mathematics.
