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Summary: the quick way to twiddle bits
Review: Anyone can reverse the bits in a byte, so the LSB is in the MSB position etc., using a while loop. Only thing is, there's a quicker way using multiplication, and that way is in this book. Lots of embedded and kernel developers twiddle bits for a living. This book describes so many techniques that I've used or needed. I wish I'd been handed this book at the beginning of my career instead of in the middle. You won't use this book every day, but every day you use it will save you a week, or more importantly a few desparately needed microseconds. It's intensely practical, not theoretical. It can be a little hard to find what you're looking for here, but mostly because it's so densely packed. It's way too nerdy for the merely curious, but quite the indispensible reference for the seasoned bit-pusher.
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Summary: Excellent Catalog of Techniques
Review: I feel compelled to point out that this book is _not_ a few things: It's not a book that teaches you how to break into computers, or crack codes. It's also not the kind of book that teaches you how to do something which you don't know how to do. This book is a collection of tricks that show the reader better ways to do things they already know how to do. And it's also a book that can give the reader insight into different approaches and mechanisms for solving problems. Computer programmers translate their ideas and requirements into any of several computer languages. Those expressions are limited by the language the programmer is using, and maybe even the machine the programmer is targeting. But there is a wide continum of expressions that result in the same -- hopefully correct -- results. Choosing the most efficient, and most elegant, expression to some is "real" hacking. This book is for real hackers. It's a great collection of tricks for performing usually simple operations in an elegant way. What's elegant? Well, elegant is efficeint. If there's a side-effect of an elegant operation, it turns out that side-effect is probably useful and not simply discarded. This book catalogs insights into concrete binary math, shortcuts derived from different boolean operators, and even approaches some interesting numerical analysis problems. If you already know how to write software, and you already know you want to find faster or more efficient ways to check for overflows on integers, divide nubmers, count bits, search for binary patterns, or do other twiddling, then this book is for you. If the application of such techniques doesn't seem important to you, then this book probably isn't going to be of interest to you.
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Summary: Read it to really understand binary arithmetic
Review: I've just read only section 2-1 (Manipulating Rightmst Bits) and I got much better understanding of binary arithmetic than I had before. As a collection of different computer arithmetic techniques the book is brilliant, but I think the book would have been even better if the auther had included derivations for formulas.
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Summary: this book rocks!
Review: If you love the nuts and bolts of logical operations in computer programming, do I have a book for you! This book does a great job of describing in reasonable detail logical operators and what you can do with them ranging from very basic "what is it" to reasonably advanced applications such as wierd base -2 math, division, pattern matching, etc. I found this book to be a great reference and refresher clearly layed out and easy to read. I wish my software engineer co-workers would read this book. I'm tired of seeing ugly code (a while loop with a mod operator to align data pointers on, say, 8 byte boundaries).
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Summary: Computer arithmetic at its best
Review: No where will you find such a detailed study on the inner working of computer arithmetic.
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