The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

10.2 Instructions That Manipulate Bits

Bit manipulation generally consists of six activities: setting bits, clearing bits, inverting bits, testing and comparing bits, extracting bits from a bit string, and inserting bits into a bit string. By now you should be familiar with most of the instructions we'll use to perform these operations; their introduction started way back in the earliest chapters of this text. Nevertheless, it's worthwhile to review the old instructions here as well as present the few bit-manipulation instructions we've yet to consider.

The most basic bit-manipulation instructions are the and, or, xor, not, test, and shift and rotate instructions. Indeed, on the earliest 80x86 processors, these were the only instructions available ...