Copied introduction from the manual.

Rev: src/nettle/README:1.2

README

+What is Nettle? A quote from the introduction in the Nettle Manual:
+
+  Nettle is a cryptographic library that is designed to fit easily in more
+  or less any context: In crypto toolkits for object-oriented languages
+  (C++, Python, Pike, ...), in applications like LSH or GNUPG, or even in
+  kernel space. In most contexts, you need more than the basic
+  cryptographic algorithms, you also need some way to keep track of available
+  algorithms, their properties and variants. You often have some algorithm
+  selection process, often dictated by a protocol you want to implement.
+  
+  And as the requirements of applications differ on subtle and not so
+  subtle ways, an API that fits one application well can be a pain to use
+  in a different context. And that is why there are so many different
+  cryptographic libraries around.
+  
+  Nettle tries to avoid this problem by doing one thing, the low-level
+  crypto stuff, and providing a @emph{simple} but general interface to it.
+  In particular, Nettle doesn't do algorithm selection. It doesn't do
+  memory allocation. It doesn't do any I/O.
+  
+  The idea is that one can build several application and context specific
+  interfaces on top of Nettle, and share the code, testcases, banchmarks,
+  documentation, etc. For this first version, the only application using
+  Nettle is LSH, and it uses an object-oriented abstraction on top of the
+  library. 
+
+Build nettle with the usual ./configure && make && make check && make
+install. Read the manual. Mail me if you have any questions or
+suggestions.
+
+Happy hacking,
+/Niels Möller <nisse@lysator.liu.se>