I have read this book, on the other hand. In fact, I read this book quite a few years ago before I was seriously interested in Cryptography.

This book provides an interesting view on the concrete applications of Cryptography, with a focus on what I’ll call more “traditional” Cryptography. So, a lot of symmetric Cryptography, with a focus on various block cipher modes, and usages of hash functions, along with some basic uses of public key Cryptography, for encryption and signatures.

With a bit of hindsight, I think this book is great, but perhaps a bit outdated. This book doesn’t really contain any mistakes, but I think the presentation of certain topics would be different if the book were written now. For example, I would like to see encryption focus more on AEAD modes, over block cipher modes. For public key Cryptography, I think presentations on Elliptic Curve Cryptography would be important, if not even Post-Quantum Cryptography. There’s also more advanced applications of public key Cryptography than just encryption and signatures, so I feel like presenting those would be interesting as well.

Nonetheless, there’s a lot of interesting material in this book which can’t be found elsewhere, like the chapter on storing key material. The presentation of the book is also really great, with a consistently approachable and grounded writing style.

So, there’s a lot of things to take away from this book, but I wouldn’t vehemently recommend it. On the other hand, it is sort of a “classic” at this point, so it should probably feature somewhere on your bookshelf.