Reply To: The Library
For those of you who are looking for a more mathematical book, An Introduction to Mathematical Cryptography by Hoffstein, Pipher, and Silverman is a wonderful introduction to modern cryptography which is essentially self contained and includes some useful results and methods from Number Theory, Abstract Algebra and Information theory. It’s one of those books where if you have an hour or two to kill you can pull it off the shelf and read a couple of sections. It also has a substantial number of exercises at the end of each chapter which (if I remember correctly) aren’t too hard and by the end aren’t too easy.