A New Book on Codebreaking by Elonka Dunin and Klaus Schmeh

I got a new book, Codebreaking, A Practical Guide by Elonka Dunin and Klaus Schmeh, hot from the press.
I have long known Elonka's name by her webpage formerly titled "Elonka's List of Famous Unsolved Codes and Ciphers" without knowing her other achievements in codebreaking, authoring, and public speaking (her bio).
I have known Klaus by his blog Klausis Krypto Kolumne, where many people in the world discuss crypto mysteries and solve hitherto unsolved cryptograms. I'm greatly honored to be credited as one of the proofreaders in the book by these two authors of world fame. (I also contributed a blurb to the official page of the authors.)

This comprehensive book provides separate chapters for just about every major encryption scheme historically used: Caesar ciphers, simple substitution ciphers, homophonic ciphers, codes and nomenclators, polyalphabetic ciphers, complete columnar transposition ciphers, incomplete transposition ciphers, turning grille transposition ciphers, digraph substitution, abbreviation ciphers, dictionary codes and book ciphers, among others. One can see variants of ciphers that may be treated in one chapter in other books are given separate chapters. Each chapter not only provides cracking techniques for each scheme, but also presents "success stories", "challenges", and "unsolved cryptograms" from actual examples.

To me, the chapter "16. Solving ciphers with hill climbing" was the most interesting. Hill climbing is a computer-based technique that has proven very successful in solving historical ciphers. This chapter introduces no less than thirteen "success stories", which I believe is the most comprehensive list up to now of achievements in codebreaking by hill climbing. This chapter may be worth publication as a book on its own, with more details on designing of specific fitness functions and techniques for randomising.

Many actual examples and images, ranging from encrypted postcards to epistles written by famous historical persons, are not the least appeal of this book. (Elgar's Dorabella cipher is well-known, but I didn't know cryptograms of Beatrice Potter and Rudyard Kipling.) Although many of them can also be seen on the authors' websites, it is good to see them in classified chapters in a book.