How long does it take to read The Code Book?
The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
The Code Book by Simon Singh takes about 7 hours 38 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 7 hours 38 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1999. 416 pages, about 114,400 words.
16 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 12 hours 43 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 38 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 46 minutes |
The page count is the median across 23 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In his first book since the bestselling Fermat's Enigma, Simon Singh offers the first sweeping history of encryption, tracing its evolution and revealing the dramatic effects codes have had on wars, nations, and individual lives. From Mary, Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code, to the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II, to the incredible (and incredibly simple) logisitical breakthrough that made Internet commerce secure, The Code Book tells the story of the most powerful intellectual weapon ever known: secrecy. Throughout the text are clear technical and mathematical explanations, and portraits of the remarkable personalities who wrote and broke the world's most difficult codes. Accessible, compelling, and remarkably far-reaching, this book will forever alter your view of history and what drives it. It will also make you wonder how private that e-mail you just sent really is.
Subjects: Cryptography, History, Data encryption (Computer science), Coding theory, Confidential communications, Ciphers
