You must know how to program, preferrably in C.
The fact is, most microcontrollers are programmed in C, its a lightweight programming language that is well suited to the restrictive environment. You can also do many of these examples in BASIC but I doubt I'll have time to put up those versions
Here is a tutorial
I learned C about 12 years ago from a book that came with a CD and had lots of examples, I think it was "Learn C in 21 days" or some nonsense. It doesn't matter how you do it, but this tutorial assumes that you know what a
for loop is and how
bit-wise arithmetic work, etc.
You also need to be able to convert hex, binary and decimal (using a calculator).
Microcontrollers are tougher to program because there is limited debugging capability.