I took an Intro to Crypto course offered through my University's Mathematics department and we used that exact text. I'm the kind of person that requires a very

I took an Intro to Crypto course offered through my University's Mathematics department and we used that exact text. I'm the kind of person that requires a very good text in order to do well in a course, and the book in question was of high enough quality that I did quite well. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the Mathematical focus of the course, my particular teacher spent a good deal of the course discussing semi-related Number Theory topics at the expense of introducing some of the more interesting cryptography concepts. That said, we still learned the theory behind the important ones: DES, AES, RSA, and ElGamal, in addition to "classical" forms such as Caesar, Vigenère, and Hill. Another downside of the course being a Math course and not a CS course: we used Mathematica for all of our "programming" projects, which felt awkward and clunky. I remember coding my solutions in Python first, making sure they were correct, and then translating them to Mathematica after the fact. Good luck in the course! It'll be hard work, but its absolutely worth the effort.