In the realm of publishing, there are many different genres and many different audiences for authors to appeal to. While books in the academic publishing world tend to be written by, and intended for, experts and students in the field, the realms of “pop” science, history, and other non-fiction genres aim at disseminating specialized knowledge to a more general audience. The Code Book is an example of the “pop” non-fiction phenomenon, as the author, Simon Singh, is an academic who has spent many years in the entertainment and media universe as well.

This book was written and published in the late 1990s, with the first edition published in 1999 and the revised edition appearing in 2000. From this perspective, the book reads as a good encapsulation of the way the topic was viewed at the turn of the millennium. On the one hand, there is a lot that the author gets right about the current state of affairs, as well as the predictions of the development moving in the direction of quantum mechanics and the increasing desire for the public to keep their information private.