We covered hashing functions a fair amount in this book, especially in Chapter 8, Understanding Code Execution and Asynchronous Operations. This area is constantly advancing and it's useful to keep an eye on the future to see what's coming. Although today it is reasonable to use a member of the SHA-2 family for quick hashing and PBKDF2 for slow (password) hashing, this is unlikely to always be the case.
For fast hashing, there is a new family of algorithms called SHA-3, which should not be confused with SHA-384 or SHA-512 (which are both in the SHA-2 family). SHA-3 is based on an algorithm called Keccak, which was the winner of a competition to find a suitable algorithm for the new standard. Other finalists included Skein ...
