[PeterisP]

The old Cryptopals challenges (http://cryptopals.com/) seem to cover the same material in a pedagogically very different way - they don't feed you the information as this book does, but give you a practical task which can be easily done with e.g. reading the specification of an algorithm from wikipedia, but figuring out the implementation of the attack yourself gives a much better understanding than simply reading about it.

Although this book claims a "Learn by doing" approach, I didn't find any specific assignments or data samples to facilitate that.

[lvh]

Hi! I'm the author. Also a big fan of Cryptopals; I was one of the reviewers for Set 8, and working with some of the authors. It's interesting to hear that point of view; because I thought C101 took the same approach as Cryptopals in the sense that it focused on teaching crypto by breaking it. When I say "learn by doing", I'm referring to stuff like walking through a bit-flipping attack just like cryptopals does. I recommend (and have organized/will be organizing) study groups where we work through cryptopals using Crypto 101; and I think that's a great idea. I was originally going to add exercises for C101, but honestly, Cryptopals was already that, and there wasn't much point in reinventing the wheel. I guess I should probably link to them?

[boterock]

I think it would be good to link them, I started reading, got to page 30 and thought it would be nice to try the challenge. This reminds me when I thought I could handle myself in Linux, but when I played OverTheWire wargames, I still learned a ton of things that you only learn by doing.

[meadori]

I had a similar POV as well -- I went into reading this book thinking there would be exercises and projects to reinforce the ideas. In particular, the following sentence (and remaining paragraph) in Chapter 1 set me up for that:

  > The exercises accompanying this book focus on teaching cryptography by breaking inferior systems.