Back Cover Blurb
- In Hacker’s Delight, Second Edition, Hank Warren once again compiles an irresistible collection of programming hacks: timesaving techniques, algorithms, and tricks that help programmers build more elegant and efficient software, while also gaining deeper insights into their craft.
- Warren’s hacks are eminently practical, but they’re also intrinsically interesting, and sometimes unexpected, much like the solution to a great puzzle. They are, in a word, a delight to any programmer who is excited by the opportunity to improve.
- Extensive additions in this edition include:-
- A new chapter on cyclic redundancy checking (CRC), including routines for the commonly used CRC-32 code
- A new chapter on error correcting codes (ECC), including routines for the Hamming code
- More coverage of integer division by constants, including methods using only shifts and adds
- Computing remainders without computing a quotient
- More coverage of population count and counting leading zeros
- Array population count
- New algorithms for compress and expand
- An LRU algorithm
- Floating-point to/from integer conversions
- Approximate floating-point reciprocal square root routine
- A gallery of graphs of discrete functions
- Now with exercises and answers
- Henry S. Warren, Jr., has had a fifty-year career with IBM, spanning from the IBM 704 to the PowerPC and beyond. He has worked on various military command and control systems and on the SETL (SET Language) project under Jack Schwartz. Since 1973, Hank has been with IBM’s Research Division, focusing on compilers and computer architectures. He currently works on a supercomputer project aimed at an exaflop. Hank received his Ph.D. in computer science from the Courant Institute at New York University.
Amazon Customer Review
- Any book with the word "hacker" catches my attention. I probably have 10 books or more with this word in the title. This book is special because it was the first books with the word "hacker" that I ever got. The word "hacker" in this book is meant in original sense of an aficionado of computers - someone, who enjoys making computers do new things, and do old things in a new and clever way.
- Hacker's Delight is another timeless classic. It's a collection of small programming tricks that the author, Harry Warren, software veteran with 50 years of experience, has come across in his career. These programming tricks exclusively revolve around low-level bithacks, creative arithmetic, and finding the most effective ways to count the number of 1 bits in a word, transposing bit matrices, permuting bits, reversing and rearranging bits and bytes, dividing by constants, and many more.
- I've placed this book #19 in my Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science books list: Link
- Some of the most interesting parts of the book include computing reminders without computing quotient, cyclic redundancy checking (CRC), Hamming SEC-DED algorithm and error correcting codes, unusual bases for number systems, such as bases -2 and -1+i, generating Hilbert curves, and formulas for generating primes, and a gallery of graphs of discrete functions.
- If you spend more than a week with this book you'll start dreaming in binary and hex, and your brain will get filled with tons of geeky magical numbers, such as, 0x40490FDB and 0x7F80000.
Book Comment
- Addison Wesley; 2 edition (25 Sept. 2012), hardback.
- Present from Tim&Becky
- See the book's website: Link
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)