Where's the best place to start learning cryptography

[justtheticket]

I'm such a dabbler of tech...learn a bit here and there, program a bit of xcode, java, css, php, sql etc... but never dig in too deep. But cryptography really fascinates me. I'm sure most of you will say 'Study Maths' but are there some shortcuts or some fundamental mathematical concepts that need to be understood first? I'd love to understand Andreas Antonopoulos' book a bit easier!