Foundations of Cryptography: Volume 1, Basic Tools

This is a great book. Solid, rigorous but not obscure. The author goes into lots of details and presents long proofs along the way, but the book is supposed to be like that... You will find a rigorous introduction to three concepts: one-way functions, pseudorandom generators and zero-knowledge proofs. Volume II of the book will show how to conceptually build cryptographic tools using these concepts (but he won't present pseudocode or get into implementation details -- that's not the point of his work).Sections that are difficult and that could be skipped are marked with an asterisk.One thing the reader should be aware of is that the author strongly opposes to using the "Random Oracle model", so if you want more information on that you'll have to find it elsewhere.For anyone interested in theoretical cryptography, I'd say this book is absolutely required reading -- I suggest always having it around for reference.

Good for the study of modern cryptography. Recommended by the open course ware at MIT.

This book hits some extremes in good and bad. The good is easy: There are few (no?) other books that fill the niche of theoretical cryptography. There are some excellent lecture notes from Bellare and Goldwasser that are available on the web, but they don't go into the detailed motivation of topics that Goldreich does. The topics that Goldreich has chosen cover a lot of important areas, and he has done a great job of pulling out the best, most essential results to present.However, the bad part is that the writing is simply horrible. There seems to be little planning and things simply don't flow at all. Here's a specific example, which is so bad as to almost be funny: There's a huge use of footnotes for side comments, mostly because of this "stream of consciousness" writing that doesn't work things in properly. The first footnote in chapter 4 says, believe it or not, "See Footnote 13". Huh? So I go digging through the later part of the chapter, looking desperately for this gem of knowledge that will be in footnote 13, and what is it? The definition of a graph! Now come on -- chapter 4 of a book, where we've been dealing with advanced topics in computer science, and they feel the need to define a graph!?!?! Through several levels of indirection in footnotes? Come on guys, what editor let that one through?Oded is a great computer scientist, and a good guy, but please, PLEASE get a good editor for the other volumes, or maybe even a good writer to team up with!

After reading some of chapters, it seems to me that it is a bit difficult to understand even some easy concepts. The book is rich, but again it lacks of good explanations at some points.

Good for advanced cryptography learning. It is 1st book from author. Students from final year graduation and masters or PhD, suitable book for them for research or for good cryptography work.

Perfect for the basic stuff

Good book