Hacker's Delight

The author, an IBM researcher working on systems ranging from the IBM 704 to the PowerPC, collected what he called "programming tricks" over the course of his career. These tricks concern efficient low-level manipulation of bit strings and numbers. According to the book's foreword by Guy L. Steele, the target audience includes compiler writers and people writing high-performance code. Programming examples are written in C and assembler for a RISC architecture similar, but not identical to PowerPC. Algorithms are given as formulas for any number of bits, the examples usually for 32 bits. Apart from the introduction, chapters are independent of each other, each focusing on a particular subject. Many algorithms in the book depend on two's complement integer numbers. The subject matter of the second edition of the book includes algorithms for The style is that of an informal mathematical textbook.