Al Sweigart. Cracking Codes with Python. No Starch Press, San Francisco, 2018.

Many books teach beginners how to write secret messages using ciphers. A couple of books teach beginners how to hack ciphers. But no books teach beginners how to program computers to hack ciphers. This book fills that gap. This book is for those who are curious about encryption, hacking, or cryptography. The ciphers in this book (except for the public key cipher in Chapters 23 and 24) are all centuries old, but any laptop has the computational power to hack them. No modern organizations or individuals use these ciphers anymore, but by learning them, you’ll learn the foundations cryptography was built on and how hackers can break weak encryption.