[lxgr]

I just randomly picked a chapter discussing a topic I'm somewhat familiar with (the one on TLS handshakes), and I'm not impressed with what I'm seeing.

I don't think anybody that doesn't already know the basics of TLS would be able to make sense of it as presented there: There's an implicit assumption that an RSA public key is used for key establishment that's never mentioned, and the diagram (which is sloppily drawn too) doesn't help things either.

In the end, "a" secret key is used to encrypt something – but the core of TLS key establishment (again, only the RSA variants) is how that key is agreed upon using only the server's public key. That's arguably the entire algorithm here (the rest is protocol negotiation)!