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

# Solution review: Brian Kernighan’s algorithm

This is considered faster than the previous naive approach.

In this approach, we count the set bits. If a number is the power of 2, we know that only one set bit is present in its Binary representation.

In binary, we go from right to left with powers of 2.

For example:


> $2^{0}$, $2^{1}$, $2^{2}$, $2^{3}$, $2^{4}$ and so on..

## Algorithm

Before we talk about algorithmic steps, you should review the table data and slider shown below the table.

* if `(n & (n - 1) == 0)`, return `True`
* else, `False`

Let's visualize the values in the table below:

Let's see how we make use of Brain Kernighan's algorithm to achieve this.

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

Solution Review: Power of 2

Solution review: Brian Kernighan’s algorithm