In college cryptography was my main interest, but it was mostly theoretical (math) and little programming, which meant I was in fact useless when it came to practice because I had no experience in implementation and (I found) there are so many unknowns that one of the most important things is experience in implementing stuff in/on a specific language/platform.

I have signed up to the Coursera course and hope to brush up on basic topics and start doing more advanced crypto.