> I don't want to snipe but it's a peeve of mine: every article about AES talks about SubBytes and ShiftRows or whatever, which is information you will never, ever use, even if your career takes a turn into cryptography engineering, but nobody talks about block cipher modes, which are basically the most important thing you can know about block cryptography.

This article is called, "Understanding how AES works". Are you upset that the author wrote such a paper? This paper isn't intended to explain how to use AES. Rather it is intended to satisfy the readers curiosity about how it works.