It's not a big deal that you don't know about this stuff. You can get very far as, for example, a web programmer without ever having to explicitly shift a bit.

It's not a big deal that you don't know about this stuff. You can get very far as, for example, a web programmer without ever having to explicitly shift a bit. If you are curious, bit shifting is essentially multiplication or division by 2. It is faster than doing the actual arithmetic. Bitwise operators just perform logical bitwise and, or, xor operations on the bit representations of two numbers. This is especially useful if you have mapped some data to binary 0-1 vectors and those operations are semantically meaningful for the representation. Just as an example, you can calculate the Hamming distance between two 0-1 vectors by taking an XOR of their integer representations and then accumulating the 1s digits for all shifts (towards 0) of the XOR-ed value.