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Hacker's Delight [Hardcover]

Henry S. Warren (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews) |
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Book Description

Publication Date: July 27, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0201914654 | ISBN-13: 978-0201914658 | Edition: 1
A collection useful programming advice the author has collected over the years; small algorithms that make the programmer's task easier. * At long last, proven short-cuts to mastering difficult aspects of computer programming * Learn to program at a more advanced level than is generally taught in schools and training courses, and much more advanced than can be learned through individual study/experience. * An instant cult classic for programmers! Computer programmers are often referred to as hackers -- solitary problem solvers engrossed in a world of code as they seek elegant solutions to building better software. While many view these unique individuals as "madmen," the truth is that much of the computer programmer's job involves a healthy mix of arithmetic and logic. In Hacker's Delight, veteran programmer Hank Warren shares the collected wisdom -- namely tips and tricks -- from his considerable experience in the world of application development. The resulting work is an irresistible collection that will help even the most seasoned programmers better their craft. Henry S. Warren Jr. has had a 40-year career with IBM, spanning the computer field from the IBM 704 to PowerPC. He has worked on various military command and control systems, and on the SETL project under Jack Schwartz at NYU. Since 1973 he has been in IBM's Research Division at Yorktown Heights, New York. Here he has done compiler and computer architecture work on the 801 computer and its several variants through PowerPC. Presently he is working on the Blue Gene petaflop computer project. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Courant Institute at New York University in 1980.

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Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"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."

--Josh 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."

--Guy Steele

These are the timesaving techniques relished by computer hackers--those devoted and persistent code developers who seek elegant and efficient ways to build better software. The truth is that much of the computer programmer's job involves a healthy mix of arithmetic and logic. In Hacker's Delight, veteran programmer Hank Warren shares the tricks he has collected from his considerable experience in the worlds of application and system programming. Most of these techniques are eminently practical, but a few are included just because they are interesting and unexpected. The resulting work is an irresistible collection that will help even the most seasoned programmers better their craft.

Topics covered include:

  • A broad collection of useful programming tricks
  • Small algorithms for common tasks
  • Power-of-2 boundaries and bounds checking
  • Rearranging bits and bytes
  • Integer division and division by constants
  • Some elementary functions on integers
  • Gray code
  • Hilbert's space-filling curve
  • And even formulas for prime numbers!

This book is for anyone who wants to create efficient code. Hacker's Delight will help you learn to program at a higher level--well beyond what is generally taught in schools and training courses--and will advance you substantially further than is possible through ordinary self-study alone.



0201914654B06272002

About the Author

Henry S. Warren, Jr., has had a forty-year career with IBM, spanning from the IBM 704 to the PowerPC. He has worked on various military command and control systems and on the SETL project under Jack Schwartz at New York University. Since 1973 he has been with IBM's Research Division, focusing on compilers and computer architectures. Hank currently works on the Blue Gene petaflop computer project. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the Courant Institute at New York University.



0201914654AB06272002
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 306 pages
  • Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (July 27, 2002)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0201914654
  • ISBN-13: 978-0201914658
  • Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #26,424 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's Henry S. Warren Page
Henry S. Warren
There's a short bio on the back cover of Hacker's Delight.

I want to point out here the existence of www.HackersDelight.org. This site has errata files for the book, C code for the algorithms in the book and many similar algorithms, and a lot of new material that may be included in a second edition, if there should be one.

Customer Reviews

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
175 of 179 people found the following review helpful
Magic May 28, 2005
Format:Hardcover
First of all, the book itself is incredible.

The title was poorly chosen, I think. The connotation of "hacker" in the public mind is somewhat different than the word's meaning forty years ago at MIT, and I found (and continue to find) this book shelved alongside ephemera about firewalls and internet security. Thinking it was about "1337 hacking", I picked it off the shelf for a quick sneer. Six hours later, the bookstore had to kick me out because they were closing.

Think of it as "The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 0: Bit Manipulation". Except without the annoying Knuth attitude.

"Hacker's Delight" is a timeless classic, a scholarly and exhaustive treatment of finite-word-length arithmetic and other bit-manipulation algorithms. The book is excellently written and the material lovingly presented. For some people (such as me), the mathematical beauty and cleverness of the solutions is reason enough to find the book fascinating. For other people (such as me), there are extensive practical applications.

However, the size of the latter group (or, perhaps, relative percentage) is dwindling with time. A programmer who thinks that the universe begins and ends with Oracle and PHP respectively is unlikely to need an 8-RISC-instruction algorithm for dividing integers by 7. The essence of programming is abstraction, and as computational resources become more abundant, the path of progress abstracts further and further away from the machine. For many modern programmers, there are no bits -- there are only "numbers" (double-precision floats, typically), and the hardware handles these floats just as gracefully as integers. In this world, one's complementing and shifting have no meaning.

Even for those working at a lower level, the caching and pipelining schemes of modern architectures can complicate some of the assumptions in this book. For example, branch performance is highly architecture-dependent, and the efficiency that can be gained through branch tuning can outweigh that of shaving off a few instructions. Warren is careful to provide and identify branch-free algorithms whenever possible, but it often is not. As another example, parallel instruction scheduling means that not only is a routine no longer the sum of its instructions' cycles, it's not even completely deterministic, at least from the programmer's perspective.

But I work in the embedded field, and my targets have ranged from 1 MHz 8-bit 6502s through 50 MHz 32-bit Coldfires to creatively-handicapped DSPs of various sorts. Not a FPU or branch predictor in sight. In such situations, the algorithms in "Hacker's Delight" can be lifesavers. Not to mention, so much fun! If you approach optimization as a puzzle, wherein the solution is its own reward, this book is indeed a compendium of delights.

Many descriptions of this book refer to it as a collection of programming "tricks". I dislike that word; it implies a casualness and triviality that does not befit a book of this rigor and scope. I prefer the subtitle of Johnson and Graham's text on high-speed digital design: "A Handbook of Black Magic".

If your magic dust is bits and cycles, this is your spellbook.
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67 of 68 people found the following review helpful
Reader's Delight August 18, 2002
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
Early drafts of Dr Warren's book have circulated for several years samizdat style among a group of hardware, compiler and OS people at a large computer research lab. One copy in particular always sits about three feet from me. If the building were to catch on fire, you might very well hear shouts of "who's taking Hacker's Delight?"
How do you determine, using the smallest number of instructions, if a word contains at least one zero byte? How do you transpose a bit matrix? Divide by 5? Count the number of ones in a word? Permute bits? Maybe you're smart enough to already know. Or perhaps you know someone else who does. For the rest of us there's Hacker's Delight.
Some years back, in the course of building a large machine, we made a mistake that resulted in some very expensive rework. Just one particular paragraph in this book would have saved us an amount of money best not admitted in print. If you have Knuth on your shelf then there's a good chance that you'll want Hacker's Delight right next to it.
And just in case life is getting too serious, there are some entertaining chapters on prime numbers and Hilbert curves, written so compellingly that you can't stop reading until the end.
Highly recommended. If this book relates to the kind of work you do, then don't leave home without it.
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68 of 71 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I feel compelled to point out that this book is _not_ a few things: It's not a book that teaches you how to break into computers, or crack codes. It's also not the kind of book that teaches you how to do something which you don't know how to do.

This book is a collection of tricks that show the reader better ways to do things they already know how to do. And it's also a book that can give the reader insight into different approaches and mechanisms for solving problems.

Computer programmers translate their ideas and requirements into any of several computer languages. Those expressions are limited by the language the programmer is using, and maybe even the machine the programmer is targeting. But there is a wide continum of expressions that result in the same -- hopefully correct -- results. Choosing the most efficient, and most elegant, expression to some is "real" hacking.

This book is for real hackers. It's a great collection of tricks for performing usually simple operations in an elegant way. What's elegant? Well, elegant is efficeint. If there's a side-effect of an elegant operation, it turns out that side-effect is probably useful and not simply discarded.

This book catalogs insights into concrete binary math, shortcuts derived from different boolean operators, and even approaches some interesting numerical analysis problems.

If you already know how to write software, and you already know you want to find faster or more efficient ways to check for overflows on integers, divide nubmers, count bits, search for binary patterns, or do other twiddling, then this book is for you.

If the application of such techniques doesn't seem important to you, then this book probably isn't going to be of interest to you.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews
At least one copy is necessary for your development team library
Hacker's Delight bridges the gap between Hamming code theory and practical software application with working source code samples. Read more
Published 20 days ago by gregb
Misleading title
The title is misleading, in that its content would enhance the toolbox of any serious programmer, while hackers attack programs at a much higher system level. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Allyn Rothman
Fun, nifty, informative
Based on the famous HAKMEM AI Memo 239 from MIT, this is a really great book for anyone who enjoy low level bit twiddling. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Shae Erisson
Must have!
This is great book that you must have somewhere around when you are writing some code. But I must say that this book is, in some way, Introduction to Donald Knuth's books: Concrete... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Boris
Full of Useful Bit Mastering Tricks
If you want to get the most out of your clock ticks, this book will help. It has a wide variety of useful tips for programming challenges.
Published 14 months ago by John Morrison
Amazing
Don't be fooled by the title, this is not a book about hacking in the sense of compromising a computer, but rather the original sense of the word "hacker," as in, thinking outside... Read more
Published 16 months ago by Lance C. Hibbeler
Another five star review
Most of the stuff in this book, usually also more updated, is of course available on the web. I knew most of the tricks from Agner Fog's works, the 'aggregate magic algorithms' and... Read more
Published 17 months ago by T. B. Gausen
Comprehensive!
Hacker's Delight really is delightfully comprehensive, not to mention fantastically dense. It's really more of a reference but you can certainly read it from cover to cover... Read more
Published on February 23, 2009 by Brian Gordon
Bit-banger's delight. More fun than a barrel of monkeys.
If you find delight in the optimization of code--and you SHOULD--this is the book for you.

The book contains a great collection of techniques and tricks for highly... Read more
Published on September 12, 2008 by jose.r-s
This is a fantastic book!
I have a virtual calculator called the DIY Calculator that accompanies my own book "How Computers Do Math" The Definitive Guide to How Computers Do Math : Featuring the Virtual DIY... Read more
Published on March 23, 2007 by Clive (Max) Maxfield
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