Cryptography Decrypted

Behind the Scenes

Writing a book with one’s spouse is a daring adventure. In the midst of our writing, our editor, asked me, “How can you write a book with your husband?” in a tone that clearly expressed wonderment that man and wife could stay man and wife on such an endeavor.

I guess to stay politically correct I should say, “husband and wife.” But man and wife is more appropriate because he acted like a man and I acted like a wife turned tough editor and first-time reader of a technology I knew nothing about. I believe the combination was awesome and the proof of the pudding is in the reviews and comments we got and continue to get saying, “you make computer cryptography understandable and enjoyable to read.” Well, let me tell you, it wasn’t always that way to write.

Divorce Court Avoided

The favorite story my co-author husband likes to tell and I like to remind him of at appropriate times is the one where he’d been laboring over a particularly difficult part of the book, writing and rewriting. When he finally turned it over to me to read, I yellowed it up with comments about not understanding this and not understanding that. As we bent over the computer examining those comments, he turned to me with that crazy-man-eyes-blazing look and said, “You know why you don't understand? I'll tell you why you don't understand. You don’t understand because you are a f___ing idiot!”

He was lucky I was a writer. I knew when he brought this project to me to consider that it wasn’t going to jump on the page in perfect form just because he’d put some pictures together that explained it to computer lovers in a seminar. I knew he had a vision of what should be done with technology books and what could be done with this technology. His vision was contagious and that’s why I joined him, even wrote the book proposal after discussing it with him.

So you want to know what I did when he called me a f___ing idiot? The short answer is eventually we laughed about it, since it was one of the most memorable of our book writing experiences together. The longer answer is I didn’t throw books at him, and I didn’t withdraw favors from him. I backed out of the room and just let him simmer for awhile. I understood. What he was doing was intense. He was trying to explain something to me that he’d known nothing about only a few months before.

Experts at Teaching

It’s funny to me that people think you need to be an expert to write a technical book. But in my view, most experts understand their subject matter so well that they have forgotten what it was like not to understand it. In other words, most people who call themselves experts are too far removed from their own learning curve to relate the information simply enough to others. We, on the other hand, were really new to the subject matter and fascinated by it. The reader benefited from our recurrent “ah ha’s”. As we wrote, more clarity emerged with the help of some excellent reviewers who pointed us straight when we went astray.

In fairness to ourselves, we are experts; we are experts at teaching ourselves new stuff that interests us. Over the years, I’ve had to learn everything you I needed to know about teaching language to ensure our dyslexic son learned how to read and write, and my husband had to learn everything about C, C++, Java, cryptography, XML,etc., to build systems and teach others.

Fascinating Territory on the Frontier's Edge

Along the way, of course, I learned a little computer cryptography. To me, the most fascinating thing about cryptography is how it has influenced all of history and how I never read about it in a history book while growing up. I don’t think cryptography’s impact on history will change in the future, not with digital signatures and public key infrastructure becoming more a part of our everday lives. So, it is worthwhile for everyone to have a basic understanding of how this technology works and how that might impact our individual and collective security.

I can see computer cryptography coming into my life though I know it is not widespread yet. It’s like seeing a few people ride around in those new-fangled automobiles while most are still aback a horse. It’s inevitable, but more highways and gas stations (infrastructure) are needed to help pave the way.

So I felt like I was on the edge of the frontier helping my cowboy husband ride into unknown territory that was bound to be explored by everyone, but as yet had mostly been explored by those scouting mathematicians. What a strange concept to write a book on computer cryptography for nonmathematicians with pictures that explained the concepts! There is a little math in the middle of the book that any sixth grader could understand and a lot of math in the back that no ordinary sixth-grader would get near, but both doses can be skipped without jeopardizing the reader’s basic understanding of the concepts.

A Better Way to Explain

How did we write a book about a subject that for thousands of years has been designed for confusion and get reviewers’ comments like: “The authors set the highest standards in document design, clear writing and integration of prose and illustration. They have managed to make a complex, difficult subject easy to understand.”?

For years, my husband has bought and read technology books, shelves and shelves of technology books. The more books he had, the greater likelihood he’d be able to piece together his own understanding of the content. Neither of us learn easily with lots of words thrown at us, especially if meaning does not clearly emerge from those words. But if we want to know something, we persist. Eventually we asked ourselves, isn’t there a better way to explain things?

We knew there was.

First rule The first rule in our book: If you have a choice between using a word that might have to be looked up in the dictionary and using a more common word that means the same thing, use the more common word. It’s not that we dumbed down the book; our intention was to clearly communicate meaning on the first reading.

Years ago a college professor imprinted on my psyche how important clear communication is. During a lecture when a student asked him what a word meant, he told him to go look it up and continued on with the lecture, not caring that he’d lost the opportunity to communicate. His job was to lecture and sell his books to us. He lectured straight from his book and soon I stopped going to class, studied the book and made my A. About half way through the class, this professor died in a freak accident. I’m ashamed but delighted to say that I still feel he got what he deserved for humiliating that humble student who just wanted to understand what he meant.

Second Rule Our second rule was to take apart the technology and present it in a logical order as simply as possible. As part of that process, we created consistent icons that looked like the concepts they were to represent. That way, when you read through the book, your understanding of how the pictures relate to each other grows. The more difficult the concept, the more essential it is to get a visual representation of it firmly planted. As I was teaching our son to read, my husband described what I was doing as “functional decomposition”, saying that most people don’t know how to do that, but good computer programmers do it well. Simply, it is taking a process apart piece by piece to see the relationship of the pieces to the whole.

Third Rule Our third rule was: The book isn’t finished until Doris understands what is on the page. I was the first-time novice reader and if I could understand it, anyone who wanted to understand it would. To ensure I’d understand, we used common analogies, mental velcro, where we could. It is so much easier to hang onto a new idea when you can relate it to something you already know.

Fourth Rule Our fourth rule: Have fun. If we can make the reader smile and understand at the same time, the concepts will be easier to learn. Our funnies are often in the footnotes so as not to interrupt the flow of the concept being explained, but got slipped into main text whenever possible.

Unspoken Rule And of course there was the fifth, unspoken but well-understood rule: Don’t call your wife a f___ing idiot before you go to bed. That’s how Cryptography Decrypted got written in such an easy-to-understand format and how our marriage survived and continues strong post publication.