So I just got done reading Hidden Codes & Grand Designs by Pierre Berloquin. The book jacket describes the book as being about covert communications and secret symbols from ancient Greece to the digital frontier, and while it does cover these topics to an extent it's more about the author's obsession with Pythagoras, his brotherhood and their number theory along with the vitruvian man.

While I did learn a few things that I wasn't aware of before, I had to keep getting past his leaps of logic. In his attempts to link almost everything back to Pythagoras or the Vetruvian man he continually confuses correlation as causation. Another stumbling block in reading this book is the decoding exercises. I understand some people probably like those little exercises but I don't read a book so that I can have homework. I also suspect that it helped pad the book. If you take out the decode exercises and the last chapter which just covers pseudo languages created over time the book would probably be lucky to cover two hundred pages.

In summation I'm not sure I could actually recommend this book to anyone, but if you like solving puzzles or are interested in how the templors, free masons, and other secret brotherhoods all unknowingly came from Pythagoreans then by all means read this book you might actually find it of interest.