Basically to become an expert cryptographer you need a math degree and ten years of experience, so this is out of question indeed. What I&#x27;m referring to is to get enough information in order to understand the big picture: what is a stream cipher, what a block cipher, a cryptographic hash function and its main properties, how many of those primitives are kinda equivalent sometimes and you can use one to create another, the tradeoff between speed and security (and how number of rounds effect the security of crypto building blocks), analyzing simple algorithms in order to <i>really</i> understand why it is so hard for you to create something secure, secure PRNG generation and weak PRNG generation (and how to break a congruential linear generator), algorithms like DH, RSA, basic knowledge on number theory, and so forth. This will not make you an expert, but will give you enough understanding in order to actually undetstand <i>why</i> a rule or a best practice is used and when it is safe or not to break it.<p>About starting point, this is incredibly sad but true: there is no Applied Cryptography of 2015. The book is at this point in some way outdated and no replacement exists, however what you can do is to read it, and then to read the documents that there are around to get updated information. Also there are now the online courses on cryptography that really help. This may look like an overkill, but at this point crypto is everywhere and is the foundation of most things secure, so it  is a requirement of everybody involved with computer security.