[prophetjohn]

> we were never taught about bit shifting at university

This is surprising to me. I'm taking a computer architecture course now and it's the third class that bitwise operations have been mentioned and in the greatest detail (exactly how it's implemented in hardware). In fact, I think it was first mentioned in my intro to CS course, which used C++ (more like C with streams, but whatever).

Is it a CS program or something like CIS?

[atomicdog]

CS courses tend to explain what bit shifting is but not when you would use it.

For example you'll often see a lecturer drawing lots of 1s and 0s on a whiteboard to illustrate it but you're less likely to see a simple example Java program which uses shifting to get RGB values deconstructed.