LTC Manual Book Project

Welcome to the LTC manual book project page.  The purpose of this part of libtomcrypt.com is to discuss the book project, how to get the book, and more importantly why I'm doing all of this anyways. 

First let me say, this is not the commercialization of LibTomCrypt.  This is merely to serve to fund my various projects throughout the year which I'll get into shortly.  Now that I got that out of the way let's get into the project.

News

December 16th, 2006 -- The books are now available for sale.  No hardcovers for sale yet. 
November 28th, 2006 -- The soft cover test prints are on the way (ETA this Friday or so).  The hardcover isn't ready yet.  In theory I'm on track for a Dec 13/14 release date.

November 23rd, 2006 -- Ordered samples of the soft and hard cover prints with the current work in progress manual (sitting in at 202 pages).  They cost me $8.58 and $18.06 respectively.  The final copy will be about 215 pages tops so plan to pay around those prices for the @cost copies.  Due to the "x-mas" rush I probably won't get them until late December.  Which gives me a few extra weeks to work on the manual before I resubmit it for the public.


What is the LTC book?

For those that don't know... LibTomCrypt is a free open source public domain cryptographic toolkit written in ISO C.  It supports a variety of cryptographic primitives from ciphers, hashes, prngs, to large integer arithmetic and public key algorithms.  The goal is to provide enough primitives and generic higher level algorithms to allow developers piece together useful cryptosystems without trying to re-tool another library (e.g. OpenSSL) to their liking.

The LTC book is actually the LTC manual that I give out for free with the public domain archive.  This is just in dead-tree format for easier reference, collection, and what not.

How is this being offered?

There are four ways to get the book (other than me just sending you a free copy or you meeting me at a conference).  I'm offering both soft and hard cover copies of the text (in 6x9 format) at the cost given by lulu.com.  That is, I make no profit off it, and the books are dirt cheap.  This is useful for people who want a dead-tree copy but don't want to give Tom money.

I'm also offering the soft cover at $25+cost, and the hard cover at $50+cost.  Those are for people who want to contribute to the LibTom fund. 

All of this will be on my lulu.com page when I have looked over the sample printing (around the end of December).  Expect a link to follow.

Why are there for-profit copies?

So you may be asking yourself why are there for-profit copies?  Or more importantly, why would I want to part with my money to give it to Tom?  Well several reasons that I can think of.  But let me first explain how I spend money.  :-)

First and foremost, I need a box to develop LTC on.  In fact, I need several boxes.  While they all run free OSS software  (e.g. Gentoo Linux) acquiring the hardware costs money.  I've ported LibTom projects to various platforms I can acquire withing my budget including the x86_32, x86_64, PPC, ARM, and AVR32 platforms.  I generally don't mind picking up the hardware because I like new toys.  But at the end of the day the costs do add up.  I also usually give away my older boxes (like my Intel Pentium 4 box) to friends and students who need a box.  On average, the typical LTC desktop I buy costs ~$1200 CAD (~950 USD).  I've bought a half dozen or so in the last few years. 

Second, I attend conferences and give presentations on various things that I think the audience will like.  Going by my last Toorcon presentation that seemed to be the case :-).  I plan to attend at least two conferences next year (Shmoocon = UVLAN, Toorcon = Safe Coding Practices (or something similar)).  Again, conferences are fun and all, but they cost money. 

Third, I sponsor stipends for conferences (well so far just Toorcon, but I plan to expand that in 2008).  In 2005, I spent a grand on a plane ticket for a student presenter, in 2006 I spent about $600 on a party dinner, and in 2007 I plan to donate $1500 USD to Toorcon to put towards another stipend and the general operating budget.  That's out of my pocket because I believe the conference is a positive influence on the security community.  (Note: this doesn't include all the random smaller expenditures I do on other peoples behalf throughout the year.)

Starting next year, I'll have LTC manuals handy.  I plan to bring free copies to the conferences I attend.  At ~8.50$ USD per copy bringing 20-25 copies to a conference can add up quickly.  The point of giving out the manuals is to expose conference goers to the LTC API and hopefully persuade them to join the LT side :-).  It's also handy because quite a few conference goers are already LT users anyways!  Hint: I may expand this to include the LTM and TFM manuals later in 2007 (which would call for new cover art... arrg).

So all this stuff costs money.  I don't mind chipping in because I think it's going to a good cause.  I'm also realistic.  Next years budget is close to $5000 USD (which is about 10.4% of my net income, and no I'm not a BYU grad...) and every bit of the book sales I can get to help with that will be a relief for me. 

Where to get it?

Link to follow.

Contents?

The LTC book is literally the PDF from LibTomCrypt.  I've commissioned covers (from RoboDesign.ro, ... another thing that cost me money :-)) to make the book look nice and aesthetic.  The back cover even has neato quotes on it.

"LibTomCrypt is clean, fast, and free - a terrific resource."
- Paul Kocher, President and Chief Scientist, Cryptography Research, Inc.

"One of the things that vexes industrial-quality software is
maintainability. The LibTom projects combine the very worthwhile
public domain code with the fact that it's efficient, maintained by
the author, and easily maintainable by us too."
- Greg Rose, VP Product Security, QUALCOMM

"I have been using LibTomCrypt for more than four years and must say that its
clever design, features, portability, and quality makes it my library of
choice as a reference implementation."
- Igor Gamayunov, Senior Software Engineer, Elliptic Semiconductor Inc.

Very nice!  :-)

The front and back covers (low res JPG copies ... the real deal uses a lossless PNG format).

Summary

So, yes you can still get the manual under the public domain license.  That even includes the right to fire it off to lulu.com and get your own copy (hint: don't do that, since my @cost copies include the nice cover art that you would get for free). 

You can get @cost copies which basically means you're paying for the printing and shipping.

So no, I'm not working on LT to make a profit.  :-)  I just realize that there are probably a few people out there willing to pick up a copy.  Heck, if I could sell 10 hard copies that pays for the freebies I plan to give out next year.

Enjoy!

Tom