Hacker's Delight

“This is the first book that promises to tell the deep, dark secrets of computer arithmetic, and it delivers in spades. It contains every trick I knew plus many, many more. A godsend for library developers, compiler writers, and lovers of elegant hacks, it deserves a spot on your shelf right next to Knuth. In the ten years since the first edition came out, it’s been absolutely invaluable to my work at Sun and Google. I’m thrilled with all of the new material in the second edition.”

— Joshua Bloch

“When I first saw the title, I figured that the book must be either a cookbook for breaking into computers (unlikely) or some sort of compendium of little programming tricks. It’s the latter, but it’s thorough, almost encyclopedic, in its coverage. The second edition covers two new major topics and expands the overall collection with dozens of additional little tricks, including one that I put to use right away in a binary search algorithm: computing the average of two integers without risking overflow. This hacker is indeed delighted!”

— Guy Steele

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.