Sahih al-Bukhari is the most trusted collection of hadith in Sunni Islam. It was compiled by Imam Muhammad ibn Isma'il al-Bukhari, who was born in Bukhara, in present-day Uzbekistan, in the year eight hundred and ten of the common era, and died near Samarqand in eight hundred and seventy.

Traditional biographies describe al-Bukhari as having an exceptional memory for hadith from a young age. As a young man he travelled widely across the major centres of Islamic learning, including the Hijaz, Iraq, Egypt and Syria, studying under a very large number of scholars, and gathering narrations directly from them. He is remembered for combining an extraordinary memory with an unusually strict and methodical approach to verifying each report.

He compiled his collection over roughly sixteen years. Classical accounts describe him examining a very large number of narrations, commonly cited as several hundred thousand, and including only those that met his strict conditions. The result is commonly cited as a little over seven thousand hadith counting repetitions, or roughly two thousand six hundred once repeated narrations are counted once. Scholars have counted it slightly differently over the centuries, so these are the commonly cited figures rather than one settled number.

Al-Bukhari's standard required an unbroken, verified chain of trustworthy and precise narrators who were known to have actually met one another. Sunni scholarship widely regards this as the strictest standard applied by any of the major compilers, which is why the collection is traditionally described as the most reliable book after the Qur'an itself. Some later scholars raised minor technical discussions about a small number of narrations, and that kind of careful scrutiny is itself part of the hadith sciences. It does not change the collection's standing.

The collection is organised into roughly ninety-seven topical books, each divided into chapters. Early books cover revelation, faith and knowledge. The worship books cover purification, prayer, zakat, fasting and Hajj in detail. Later books cover daily conduct, manners, supplications, and matters of the afterlife.

If you are new to it, a good place to begin is its famous opening hadith, on sincerity of intention, which al-Bukhari himself placed first. In the HikmahBridge Hadith Library, each hadith is referenced by its number in the collection, which is the standard way it is cited.