Your right. I learned crypto for an internship at a cryptography lab, so having the reference of the primitives that mere mortals should never touch, as well as

Your right. I learned crypto for an internship at a cryptography lab, so having the reference of the primitives that mere mortals should never touch, as well as a reference to many ideas that both worked and failed was extremely useful. Of course, if you want to learn crypto to use it well in your own (non-crypto) code, than those are probably exactly the qualities you do not want in your reference book.