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Hacker’s Delight

Hacker’s Delight
Author: Henry S. Warren, Jr.
Pages: 306
Published: 2003

You may think that I have become obsessed with books about hacking but this book is totally different from any of the others. In this book the term hacker is meant in the traditional sense (before the negative definition was popularized) of someone interested in understanding how things work and how to solve problems efficiently. Although the hacker term can be applied to whatever domain, in this book the domain is computing technology.

‘Hacker’s Delight’ is a book about bits and small programming tricks applied to machines. With ’small’ I mean that you won’t find here a description of the Merge sort or Radix sort but, for example, you will learn to determine in constant time if an integer is a power of two or not.

In more that 300 pages and with a mixture of pseudo assembler and C you will find all kind of tricks for arithmetic bounds, counting bits, searching bits, multiplications, elementary functions, floating point, etc. Even wondered if the base2 used by computers is the most efficient? This question and a lot more are covered in this book.

Although the book is a little bit oriented towards compiler developers, every ‘real’ programmer can get a huge benefit from reading and thoroughly understanding this book.

I read this book on several flights and really enjoyed this little gem book of tricks. I would definitely recommend to have it in your bookshelf.

Rating: 8 / 10