I didn’t finish reading the book. This is a good measure of how much
I “liked” it, I guess. I almost always finish a book, even when it’s
not very good, and in the rare cases when I put it aside not finishing
it, means that I really, really didn’t like it.
I tried, honest, I read a bit more than a half of it, and tried jumping
forward to see if things get better there, but they didn’t… Maybe
it’s because I’ve read the Hebrew translation ? Don’t know,
translations sometimes
reduce some of the book’s quality, but not this much, for sure.

Maybe my expectations were just different. I expected the book to talk
about the Enigma cipher, how it is built, how it was developed and
how it was broken (in detail !). The reality is, the book talks about
sea battles 95% of the time. These sailors caught this submarine here,
those sailors caught that ship there, etc etc etc for hundreds of
pages.
So OK, this is not really about the Enigma cipher itself, this is a
historic
book describing the naval war, fair enough. Again, the style of this
book
is so bad that it is hard to follow these historic stories without
getting bored.

The author tries to explain how Enigma works in the appendices, but
even
this is done badly. The first appendix starts with the exlanation of
how Enigma was first
broken, before explaining how it really works. Reading through it
reveals
that some knowledge about the cipher is needed. So I go to Appendix 3
(2 talks
about an other technique used to break Enigma), which is called “how
Enigma
works” and from the start it says - “the wheels are set as explained in
Appendix 1″… Aargh !

I did gain /some/ useful information from the book. It is obvious that
the
German mistakes and the successes of Brittish naval troops that caught
submarines and ships with valuable information, contributed to the
breaking of
the cipher no less than the brilliant people at Bletchley park.

To conclude - I think it is a very bad book. You may use it as some
historic
reference, but it’s really not interesting to read. There are much
better books
(and online references) about Enigma.

Related posts:

1. Book review: “The Da Vinci code” by Dan Brown
2. Book review: “Beautiful Code”, edited by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson
3. Book review: “Code complete” by Steve McConnell
4. Book review: “Shadows of forgotten ancestors” by Carl Sagan
5. Book review: “Perl best practices” by Damian Conway

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2003 at 11:24 am and is filed under Book reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.