Cryptography. Write application to decrypt basic ciphers

Evening all,

I have just began my final year at university and am studying cryptography. We have just been set the first assignment just 3 weeks in so I'm assuming it won't be a case of breaking the enigma code.

As part of the assignment there are 7 exercises with 2 further challenges consisting of various ciphers (Caesar, Vigenere, Transposition and general Substitution). I'd like to code some sort of application to be able to decrypt these ciphers.

I don't want to cheat, im genuinely interested in the topic and feel by coding an application to decrypt the codes I'd get more out of the assignment开发者_JS百科, having to think logically about resolving each.

I'd like to think i'm reasonably competent in Java, VB and or Javascript/HTML/CSS. So any of these platforms I'm happy to try with.

If anybody can advise any pointers I'd be grateful.

Many thanks Gary

I recommend Simon Singh's "The Code Book"; it features Caesar, Vigenere, transposition+substitution, all the way through Enigma, Lucifer (DES) and up to asymmetric and quantum crypto, along with the ways to break some of these ciphers. The Vigenere chapter explains the cryptanalysis in great detail.