To get the most out of this book
Simply be curious! Since we develop most concepts from scratch, you don’t need any additional literature, information sources, or tools to follow the book. If you decide to delve deeper into cryptography than what is covered in the book, you will find numerous useful references in the bibliography.
For readers interested in hands-on experiments with TLS, we describe several simple experiments that you can replicate (and extend) on any computer with the OpenSSL toolkit installed on it. The code listings in the corresponding chapters contain complete instructions, so there is nothing extra to download.
If you are generally interested in modern cryptography, you may skip sections describing how the individual cryptographic primitives and mechanisms are used in TLS 1.3. However, we recommend you have at least a cursory look at Part IV, Bleeding Hearts and Biting Poodles, to get an idea of why getting cryptography right is hard.
If you are interested specifically in TLS 1.3, we recommend reading the book side by side with RFC 8446. Moreover, as you are likely familiar with basic cryptography, you may skip Part I, Getting Started.
