I read The Code Book by Simon Singh in 2025 and decided to work through the Cipher Challenge (or as much as I could) for my own education and entertainment. I gathered the texts and their descriptions here in this project as a starting point.
I also found some helpful resources on the internet that will aid me as I work through the coding aspects of the project.
- Wikipedia English Letter Frequency
- SOCR Letter Frequency Data provides average frequencies for Latin letters in languages like English, German, French, Spanish, and others.
- Sttmedia.com offers specific data on German alphabet and character frequency, which may be helpful for analyzing German text.
- Cornell University’s Math Explorer’s Project also has frequency tables for cryptographic purposes. As well as a collection of substition cipher challenges.
- Richard Knights maintains a site with some cryptographic information.
- Letterfrequency.org provides a breakdown of letter frequencies across various languages as well as other useful frequencey tables.
- Python’s cryptography or pycipher packages for implementing ciphers and analyzing text.
- Cryptological Mathematics by Robert Lewand
- "How we Cracked the Code Book Ciphers" by Fredrik Almgren, Gunnar Andersson, Torbjörn Granlund, Lars Ivansson, and Staffan Ulfberg (October 11, 2000)