Figuring Things Out On Your Own

[opivfx]

Hello everyone!
I came across a site that contains exercises to test your knowledge of any given programming language. There are a couple exercises, and parts of exercises that I can do, but most of them are way beyond me. What I'd like to know is how I could go about figuring out how to do these. Here is a link to the page: http://www.knowing.net/PermaLink,guid,f3b9ba36-848e-43f8-9caa-232ec216192d.aspx
There is one problem in particular though, and that is exercise #3.

Write a program that takes as its arguments a the name of a bitmapped image (Start with images from the Waterloo Repertoire Grayset 2: http://links.uwaterloo.ca/greyset2.base.html) . Apply the Haar wavelet to the pixel values. Save the results to a file.


Can anybody tell me how I could go about figuring out how to do things like this without having to look up specific tutorials?
Note: I'm not looking for specific information on this problem, I'd just like to know how I can further my knowledge when there aren't many resources available for a specific problem.

[Lindley]

You can look up Haar wavelets on wikipedia.

[opivfx]

What I'd like to know is how to figure out how to do such things as opening a picture file and reading the data to get the pixel values, or anything else that's too specific to find good information on how to do. Should I just google anything I want to do, and then sift through all of the pages until I find a tutorial, source code, or explanation on how to do something similar to what I want to do? Or is there a better approach?

[7stud]

You should problably start by researching how a bitmap file is setup. Once you understand the layout, then you can read in the data you want to target and manipulate it.

[Zaccheus]

Should I just google anything I want to do, and then sift through all of the pages until I find a tutorial, source code, or explanation on how to do something similar to what I want to do?
That is what I normally do.

Or is there a better approach?
After a while you will notice that some websites come up again and again (with useful info) in your google results. That is one thing that brought me to CodeGuru. You will find yourself searching those sites first and will go to google less often.

If you are working with MS Windows, for example, you might go to MSDN Library (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/default.aspx) very often.