Direction needed for type of study

Asked by richard mcgill

Before I put my foot in my mouth.due to a lack of information, is there a specific direction of study that would enable understanding of 'bugs' and much of the lingo without referring to the Glossary for every word in a sentence.? I'm still stuck in a PGP key definition to sort out an earlier 'mis-tap".
it is difficult to pin point an exact problem when I don't know what I don't know.

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Colin Watson (cjwatson) said :
#1

In your previous question, you mostly seemed to get stuck in trying to understand cryptography, which is a specialist professional field of its own and not something that can be picked up immediately in the space of a few articles. (It's not my field as such either, though I have a bit of relevant training and experience.) If you're serious about wanting to pick that up, then I'd recommend the parts of https://www.schneier.com/books/applied-cryptography/ that cover concepts, without necessarily needing to go through all of the fine details of individual protocols. However, this is of course something of an investment of both time and money, and maybe starting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography and being cautious about following links until you understand what you're looking for would also be a reasonable approach. *Don't* try to dive straight into the technical specification of a particular protocol before you have a handle on the concepts.

But other than that, your question is too broad for me to be able to answer effectively, because it's essentially "how do I study?". Perhaps: try to work out what the relevant top-level concepts might be for whatever you're trying to understand, find good-quality primers for those, and give yourself enough time and energy to understand those properly; it's normally the case that you need to grasp the basic concepts ("what problem is this piece of technology trying to solve?") before you can evaluate anything else in that field.

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richard mcgill (nurserick) said :
#2
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Colin Watson (cjwatson) said :
#3

We're happy to help with more specific questions where we can, but unless you can be more specific about what you're stuck on, the previous answer I gave is the best I can do.

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Provide an answer of your own, or ask richard mcgill for more information if necessary.

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