Grokking Bit Manipulation For Coding Interviews

Bit manipulation is a powerful technique to optimize your algorithmic and problem-solving skills.

Bit Mask 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 learn about the six bitwise operators: AND, OR, NOT, XOR, and bit shifting. You will get tons of hands-on experience working through practice problems to help sharpen your understanding.

By completing this course, you will be able to solve problems faster with greater efficiency.

1. Master problem solving that involves bit manipulation.
2. Master the bit manipulation, which allows you to organize all inputs in binary representation at the memory levels.
3. Master how the bit-level operations are computed. Understand that bit-level operations are based on all the arithmetic operations built into all languages.
4. Solve problems commonly asked in coding interviews related to bit manipulation.
5. These bit tricks could help competitive programming in running algorithms, mainly 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 applies 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 shorter than a word.

Computer programming tasks that require bit manipulation include:

1. Low-level device control
2. Error detection and correction algorithms
3. Data compression
4. Encryption algorithms
5. 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 speed up coding as bit manipulations are processed in parallel.

Throughout the course, we offer many examples to help you understand the patterns 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 subject, the first problem will explain the underlying pattern in detail to build the concepts that can apply to the latest issues. The latest problems will focus on each problem's different constraints and how our algorithm needs to change to handle them.

Let's start to understand the crucial concepts of Bitwise operators.

Bit-level operations

1. Sometimes, it becomes mandatory to consider data at the bit level.
2. We have to operate on the individual data bit. During source code drafting, we must also turn on/off particular data bits. At that time, we must use a bitwise operator to make our task more manageable.
3. C/Java programming provides us with different bitwise operators for manipulating bits.
4. Bitwise operators operate on integers and characters but not on data types float or double.
5. Using Bitwise operators, we can easily manipulate individual bits.
6. C/Java programming supports six bitwise operators.