The Handbook of Applied Cryptography is available to purchase online, or available for download, a chapter at a time for personal use. My math skills are weak, but I think that I might skim this one while waiting for my other free books to arrive. Maybe I’ll just stick with Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought for now; it appears to have much less math, and I do have it out from the library for a bit.

An excerpt from the Preface to the Handbook of Applied Cryptography;

This book is intended as a reference for professional cryptographers, presenting the techniques and algorithms of greatest interest to the current practitioner, along with the supporting motivation and background material. It also provides a comprehensive source from which to learn cryptography, serving both students and instructors. In addition, the rigorous treatment, breadth, and extensive bibliographic material should make it an important reference for research professionals.

Our goal was to assimilate the existing cryptographic knowledge of industrial interest into one consistent, self-contained volume accessible to engineers in practice, to computer scientists and mathematicians in academia, and to motivated non-specialists with a strong desire to learn cryptography. Such a task is beyond the scope of each of the following: research papers, which by nature focus on narrow topics using very specialized (and often non-standard) terminology; survey papers, which typically address, at most, a small number of major topics at a high level; and (regretably also) most books, due to the fact that many book authors lack either practical experience or familiarity with the research literature or both. Our intent was to provide a detailed presentation of those areas of cryptography which we have found to be of greatest practical utility in our own industrial experience, while maintaining a sufficiently formal approach to be suitable both as a trustworthy reference for those whose primary interest is further research, and to provide a solid foundation for students and others first learning the subject.

Throughout each chapter, we emphasize the relationship between various aspects of cryptography. Background sections commence most chapters, providing a framework and perspective for the techniques which follow. Computer source code (e.g. C code) for algorithms has been intentionally omitted, in favor of algorithms specified in sufficient detail to allow direct implementation without consulting secondary references. We believe this style of presentation allows a better understanding of how algorithms actually work, while at the same time avoiding low-level implementation-specific constructs (which some readers will invariably be unfamiliar with) of various currently-popular programming languages.

Also, an extract from The Stuff of Thought for comparison, though it’s only free by way of the Public Library;

There is a theory of space and time embedded in the way we use words. There is a theory of matter and a theory of causality, too. Our language has a model of sex in it (actually, two models), and conceptions of intimacy and power and fairness. Divinity, degradation, and danger are also ingrained in our mother tongue, together with a conception of well-being and a philosophy of free will. These conceptions vary in their details from language to language, but their overall logic is the same. They add up to a distinctively human model of reality, which differs in major ways from the objective understanding of reality eked out by our best science and logic. Though these ideas are woven into language, their roots are deeper than language itself. They lay out the ground rules for how we understand our surroundings, how we assign credit and blame to our fellows, and how we negotiate our relationships with the. A close look at our speech — our conversations, our jokes, our curses, our legal disputes, the names we give our babies — can therefore give us insight into who we are.

That is the premise of the book you are holding, the third in a trilogy written for a wide audience of readers who are interested in language and mind. The first ‘The Language Instinct’, was an overview of the language faculty: everything you always wanted to know about language but were afraid to ask. A language is a way of connecting sound and meaning, and the other two books turn toward each of these spheres. ‘Words and Rules’ was about the units of language, how they are stored in memory, and ow they are assembled into the vast number of combinations that give language its expressive power. ‘The Stuff of Thought’ is about the other side of the linkage, meaning. Its vistas include the meanings of words and constructions and the way that language is used in social settings, the topics that linguists call semantics and pragmatics.

Great, I’m starting with the final third of a trilogy; this couldn’t end badly.