While I think that people should learn the cryptographic primitives as much as possible, the point of my post was to use a well-reputed open source authenticate

While I think that people should learn the cryptographic primitives as much as possible, the point of my post was to use a well-reputed open source authenticated encryption library. In addition to NaCl, there's also Keyczar: http://www.keyczar.org/ http://www.keyczar.org/