bits manipulation (C)

I'm an autodidact and I have programmed in C for one year now, but never studied this topic. Apart from operating systems or embedded systems, when do we need to manipulate bits in 21st century ? If you could give some examples...

>>21
Can't remember much of how I learned what I know about bit manipulation other than that I just sort of gradually learned more as I attempted to read and understand various open-source (de)muxers and codecs. Wikipedia looks like it has a good section on bitwise operators (just skimmed through it), though Wikipedia tends to be overly technical with CS stuff. Maybe you'll find it useful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitwise_operators Also, it has a link to http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html for a whole bunch of speedups due to bit manipulation hacks.