Programming Pearls : Sorting Phone Numbers
Revisiting a Classic Book I’m re-reading Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley. I read this book within a year or two of its release, early in my career. That was 16 or 17 years ago. I remember enjoying it greatly. It opened my eyes to the critical importance of selecting optimal data structures and algorithms when designing solutions to programming problems. The author advocates for deliberation prior to putting hands on the keyboard. Re-reading the book now as a more experienced (and I would hope wiser) programmer, I’m reminded of a quote from Linus Torvalds. What Jon Bentley states in elegant […]
Encrypting and Decrypting Text
In a previous post, The Math That Enables Asymmetric Key Cryptography, I discussed how your web browser and a web server can establish an encrypted communication channel without requiring you and the web administrator to meet beforehand to exchange secret keys. I explained how your web browser and a web server exchange public keys, then perform math operations on their private keys and the exchanged public keys to derive the same shared key. And I emphasized the security of this technique (Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange) is guaranteed by the computational difficulty of determining the shared key from the partial information transmitted […]
