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.
Build a conceptual model
Most data when stored in some format has some logical order to it. My data, for example, is organized into major frames, each of which contains a minor frame of data. Each minor frame has a fixed width, where certain fields in the minor frame have a specific purpose. Drawing this concept on a whiteboard makes it much easier to deal with once you start writing code and / or viewing the data in its raw format.
This is obviously impossible if you don't know what your model is. If you don't know that, then either get that information or work towards it. Manipulating bytes without knowing what they are isn't going to get you anywhere (is that a timestamp I've just read? A piece of video data? Maybe a checksum? Who knows?)
Get a Binary Editor that works for you
For small binary files, you can view the raw bytes directly in Visual Studio. For larger files, you may want to use an editor that can load the data directly and organize the data in such a manner that the view represents your model. In my case, I didn't really find a good tool for this - so I wrote one. An hour or so in any language and you should be able to write a simple application that pulls some data from a binary file and formats it so that you can see the raw bytes in a manner that makes sense with your model. In my case, it scans through the binary file looking for a major frame, and displays the minor frames in that major frame, organized such that the bytes shown are the length of the minor frame. Very handy when lining up the data.
If you don't want to write your own - I would, if only because its a useful exercise to start with - here's a few binary editors:
XVI32
HexEdit
010Editor
As I said, I wrote my own as it helped me work with my conceptual model, checked that I understood it correctly, and was custom tailored to my problem. Using a free one isn't a bad way to go however.
Work with the Data
Once you understand your data model, working with the data is fairly trivial. Say I wanted to read a binary file in 128 byte chunks, since a logical frame (maybe a minor frame, in my example) is 128 bytes long. Here's some trivial C# code that reads some binary data (not that I would rely on this - its merely an example):
private void ReadSomeData()
{
// Read data in 128 byte chunks
int frameSize = 128;
BinaryReader binReader = new BinaryReader(File.Open("C:\\Test.bin", FileMode.Open));
while (
binReader.PeekChar() != -1
)
{
byte[] receivedData = binReader.ReadBytes(frameSize);
HandleData(receivedData); // do something with it, someplace
}
// End of File reached
}