nakov/Practical-Cryptography-for-Developers-Book resource

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3824 stars · 470 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

A free, open-source book by Svetlin Nakov teaching practical cryptography for developers, covering hashes, MACs, key derivation, key exchange, symmetric and asymmetric ciphers, ECC, digital signatures, and quantum-safe cryptography with code examples. It is hosted online via GitBook and written primarily in Python examples.

Use cases

• learn how AES-GCM and authenticated encryption work
• understand elliptic curve cryptography and ECDH key exchange
• learn how ECDSA and EdDSA digital signatures work
• understand password hashing and key derivation functions like Argon2
• get an introduction to quantum-safe cryptography
• find cryptography libraries and code examples for Python and other languages

When to choose

• you are a developer wanting a practical, code-driven introduction to cryptography concepts
• you need a free reference explaining hashes, MACs, KDFs, ciphers, and signatures
• you want worked examples in Python before using crypto libraries

When to avoid

• you need a formal mathematical cryptography textbook
• you need a finished, complete reference - the book is still unfinished
• you need a crypto library to use in production rather than learning material

Facets

learning-resource · maturity active

cryptography security documentation developer-tools security developer-tools tutorials education cross-platform python cryptography book tutorial hashes hmac key-derivation aes ecc ecdsa digital-signatures quantum-safe-cryptography free-book web-server

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