When I was playing with a Java library, I realized that I need to refresh some prehistoric information. The bitwise operations in Java :
http://www.leepoint.net/notes-java/data/expressions/bitops.html
Then I found myself looking integer representations in binary formats (4Bytes) that are useful to understand the effects of bitwise operations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two%27s_complement
Stay tuned...