I want to pick up more skills like this. I've just done something similiar at work to break in to some event recorder files we could only view as the application provided no utility for exporting the data into CSV (among many other limitations). I was pretty lucky and fluked a lot of it, mainly by just identifying a pattern and messing with the hex values of a file then viewing what it did in the viewer application provided.

I'd love to expand my skills and try this out on a number of other projects. Is there some good starting material which can push me in the right direction?