There is also a reference to this method on page 61 of SICP (footnote 40 of exercise 1.18).

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-11.html...

One of my professors (I'm a French comp. sci student) taught us this as an intro on how we could build an Arithmetic Logic Unit (as part of a hardware architecture course).