FutureNerd Steve Witham says:

Is there a good not-very-technical, but up-to-date book on crypto?

An acquaintance asks.

No, there is nothing that is nontechnical and up-to-date. Indeed, I'd question the very idea -- people trying to understand cryptography in enough detail that they would understand what has happened in the last decade had best learn the technical details. On a non-technical level you can't write more than a dozen pages before exhausting the information you can convey about the technologies. The best TECHNICAL book out there on crypto at the moment is of course Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography", which is a wonderful piece of work. Perry