Sahih al-Bukhari is organised as a jami, a comprehensive collection whose books span the whole of religion: revelation, faith, knowledge, ablution and prayer, funerals, alms, fasting, pilgrimage, sales and hire, marriage, oaths, military expeditions, the beginning of creation, the virtues of the companions, commentary on the Quran, and much else, ending in the book of divine unity. The arrangement is itself an argument.
Al-Bukhari's chapter headings, the tarajim, are famous among scholars for carrying his jurisprudence: a heading states a legal position, sometimes boldly where the evidence beneath it is only suggestive, and the traditions that follow are marshalled as proof. Generations of commentators made the headings a study of their own, asking in each case what al-Bukhari meant to establish, and the greatest of the commentaries, Fath al-Bari by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani in the fifteenth century, runs to many volumes largely by taking that question seriously.
The book's authority in Sunni Islam is difficult to overstate. Paired with Sahih Muslim as the two Sahihs, it heads the six canonical collections, its traditions are cited in law, theology and preaching as decisive, and manuscripts and recitations of it have been honoured across the Islamic world for a millennium, down to public readings held in times of crisis.