It was too much for me to hope to grasp quantum computing from one book, and perhaps I got as much as I could have reasonably hoped for: I know what I don't know and I will recognize these terms when dropped at the quantum water cooler.

Coming from a science and computing background at university, I knew the basics of electronics and cryptography. I fear someone without this background might not make it far in this book. The quantum bits (er, qubits) I get the basics of, but several core concepts left me with 'how' and 'why' questions that were necessarily hand-waved, to use the author's term.

How does entanglement happen and how does one choose the kind of entanglement? Why is entanglement over large distance assumed axiomatically when it's a great feat to have it happen from one side of the table to the other? How do I get atoms in 'superposition' to give me a meaningful answer rather than a completely random number?

I come away from this book more skeptical than before about quantum computing, which surely isn't the author's desire, but it does lay the groundwork for me eventually understanding something.