Grokking Bit Manipulation For Coding Interviews
Bit manipulation, a powerful technique that can be used to optimize your algorithmic and problem-solving skills.
This is one of the most important/critical topics when someone starts preparing for coding interviews for FAANG companies.
To kick things off, you’ll start by learning about the number system and how it’s represented. Then you’ll move on to learn about the six different bitwise operators: AND, OR, NOT, XOR, and bit shifting. Throughout, you will get tons of hands-on experience working through practice problems to help sharpen your understanding.
By the time you’ve completed this course, you will be able to solve problems faster with greater efficiency.
- Master problem solving that involves bit manipulation.
- Master the bit manipulation, which allows you to organize all inputs in binary representation at the memory levels.
- Master how the bit-level operations are computed. Understand that bit-level operations are based on all the arithmetic operations built-into all languages.
- Solve problems that are commonly asked in coding interviews related to bit manipulation.
- These bit tricks could help in competitive programming in running algorithms mostly in O(1) time.
course link: Grokking Bit Manipulation For Coding Interviews
What is Bit Manipulation?
Bit manipulation is the act of algorithmically manipulating bits or other pieces of data shorter than a word. Bit manipulation is something that has constant time complexity. This tutorial explains the basics and why Bitwise operators are used in programming.
Bit manipulation is the process of applying logical operations on a sequence of bits to achieve a required result. It is an act of algorithmically manipulating bits or other pieces of data that are shorter than a word.
Computer programming tasks that require bit manipulation include:
- Low-level device control
- Error detection and correction algorithms
- Data compression
- Encryption algorithms
- Optimization
List of Bitwise operators
Operator | Name of Operator | Usage |
---|---|---|
& |
Bitwise AND | Used to mask particular part of byte |
| |
Bitwise OR | |
~ |
One's complement/NOT | Used to turn a bit on/off |
^ |
Bitwise XOR | |
<< |
Left Shift | Used to shift the bit to the left |
>> |
Right Shift | Used to shift the bit to the right |
For most other tasks, modern programming languages allow the programmer to work directly with abstractions instead of bits representing those abstractions.
Bit manipulation can obviate or reduce the need to loop over a data structure and can speed up coding as bit manipulations are processed in parallel.
Throughout the course, we offer tons of examples to help you understand the patterns used in solving bit manipulation algorithmic problems.
The problems solved under these patterns use a varied set of algorithmic techniques that you will encounter day-to-day.
We will start with a brief introduction to each topic before jumping into practice problems. Under each topic, the first problem will explain the underlying pattern in detail to build the concepts that can be applied to later problems. The later problems will focus on the different constraints each problem presents and how our algorithm needs to change to handle them.
Let’s start to understand the important concepts of Bitwise operators.
Bit-level operations
- Sometimes, it becomes mandatory to consider data at the bit level.
- We have to operate on the individual data bit. We also need to turn on/off particular data bits during source code drafting. At that time, we must use a bitwise operator to make our task easier.
- C/Java programming provides us with different bitwise operators for the manipulation of bits.
- Bitwise operators operate on integers and characters but not on data types float or double.
- Using Bitwise operators, we can easily manipulate individual bits.
- C/Java programming supports six bitwise operators.