The ultimate guide to bit manipulation for coding interviews. Developed by FAANG engineers, practice with real-world interview questions, and get interview-ready in just a few hours.

This course teaches bit manipulation, a powerful technique to enhance algorithmic and problem-solving skills. It is a critical topic for those preparing for coding interviews for top tech companies, startups and industry leaders. Competitive programmers can take full advantage of this course by running most of the bit-related problems in O(1) complexity.

The course will begin by educating you about the number system and its representation, decimal and binary, followed by the six bitwise operators: AND, OR, NOT, XOR, and bit-shifting (left, right).

You will receive ample practical experience working through practice problems to improve your comprehension.

Upon completing this course, you will be able to solve problems with greater efficiency and speed.

Grokking Bit Manipulation for Coding Interviews

# What is the Bitwise XOR operator?

This operator is same as the XOR gate that we studied in the digital electronics chapter, as shown below:

Bitwise XOR operator is denoted by `^`. When an XOR gate is given with 2 inputs, the corresponding outputs will be:

* If two input bits are different, the output is 1.
* In all other cases, it is 0.

**For example:**
  *  1 ^ 1 => yields to 0.
  *  0 ^ 0 => yields to 0.
  *  1 ^ 0 => yields to 1.
  *  0 ^ 1 => yields to 1.

So Bitwise **^** returns a `1` in each bit position for which the corresponding bits of one of the operands are 1s. 

> **Syntax:**  `a ^ b`

XOR compares each bit of the **first operand** to the **second operand**'s corresponding bit. If both bits are 1 or both bits are 0, the corresponding result bit is set to 0. Otherwise, the corresponding result bit is set to 1.



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## Truth Table

Getting Started

Number Systems, Bitwise, and Binary

Bitwise AND

Bitwise OR

Bitwise NOT

Bitwise XOR

Bit Shifting - Left, Right

Bitwise LeftShift Problems

Bitwise RightShift Problems

Final Thoughts

Introduction to XOR

What is the Bitwise XOR operator?