What is the best way to learn about twiddling with binary data?

As others have pointed out, your question is a bit odd. I'm not entirely sure what you're asking - as gkrogers pointed out, there's plenty of reference material on managing bitwise operations, looking at a binary format, etc. I'm interpreting your question to mean how do you conceptually view a binary file. I routinely deal with large amounts (gigabyte files) of data in a binary format.

The following is a few approaches I've used to viewing / manipulating the data.

How to crack a Binary File Format: http://www.iwriteiam.nl/Ha_HTCABFF.html.

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