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Applied Cryptography is still the best introductory crypto book I know of, but really the hard parts are number theory and information theory, not cryptographic applications. It'll be much easier going if you learn a bit of both before studying cryptography proper. You can grab A Computational Introduction to Number Theory and Algebra from the author's site. The learning parts aren't relevant to cryptography, but Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms is a good introduction to information theory, and you can grab pdfs off his site too. Also he's posted lectures since the last time I looked; I haven't watched them, but they might be worth checking out.