After our discussion in class on chapter 1 of The Code Book, I was able to look at the history of cryptography with a new perspective. It was interesting to read about how a society would not be able to decipher the codes until it reached a certain level of scholarship which accounted for linguistics, statistics, etc. I didn’t consider the fact that one would need a strong background in several disciplines in order to contribute to the field of cryptanalysis with creativity and great insight. It makes sense that one would especially need a strong background in linguistics to be able to make connections in a grammatical sense and across various languages when deciphering a code. Another thing I learned is that since not everyone was literate at the time, only the wealthy, who had the privilege of a getting an education, were able to use cryptography. Of course, individuals in a position of power would be the ones to have important information they would want to encrypt. The common man at that time would not even need to use cryptography for day to day needs. The most important lesson from the book was that no encryption is better than a weak one. I would suggest that no matter how confident you are in your encryption, you should always be discrete with the information you share.