I've been buying lots of cryptography books lately as I wanted to learn about the evolution of our understanding of this topic. How about some of the following

I've been buying lots of cryptography books lately as I wanted to learn about the evolution of our understanding of this topic. How about some of the following: - "Real-World Cryptography" is my recommendation for the first book to read, but probably won't work for your friend as it doesn't cover any algorithms in detail. It's a great topic to cover a lot of ground quickly to gain a good understanding of how cryptography is used in practice. - "Introduction to Modern Cryptography" is used as a textbook on many universities and I recommend it for someone who doesn't mind diving in into the maths. Being a textbook, it's fairly academic. - "The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-breaking" covers the history. - For TLS and PKI, read "Bulletproof TLS and PKI" (disclaimer: I wrote it). It's a good book to understand practical protocol engineering in the context of the evolution of TLS from 1995 until now. Edits: - The manga book is very nice and fun, but high level and dated. - Crypto by Steven Levy also recommended. - Serious Cryptography is good, but Real-World Cryptography is more recent and provides a better foundation. - Cryptography Engineering / Practical Cryptography / Applied Cryptography are often recommended, but they're very dated at this point. - Your friend might enjoy https://cryptopals.com/ https://cryptopals.com/