Bitwise operators in chapter 2...
Ha! I was wondering if this was the book that introduced binary / bitwise operators in chapter 2! There was some discussion about this before.
Don't get too bogged-down with this stuff. You can do lots of programming without it. You can learn it later at your own pace.
There is some good info on bitwise operations in the
Programming FAQ .
FYI - Binary and hex are mostly used by people who work with hardware (like me), or by programmers writing hardware drivers.
That 555 in his example should probably be 0x555 (Hex), because 5 converts to 101 binary, and 555 hex converts to 0101 0101 0101.
FYI (2) - Windows' built-in calculator can to binary-to-decimal, and binary-to-hex conversion. Programs/Accessories/Calculator - View/Scientific.
As far as the parenthesis/precedence question: I don't know the answer off-hand... But I think he's saying to add parenthesis to make the result the same as without them. This will make it easier for humans to understand what the statements are doing.