well there are alot of options which might start with a bruteforce. Try anything that come to your head till you get reasonable results. Probably not a good idea and might waste alot of time.
What i normally do, if its for a protocol then i try the RFC which always have alot of answers. But for projects that don't lead me there, i google alot till i feel i understand what am going to do as i know my name.
My other solution which sometimes accompanies those above is to head to the command line or the python prompt(even for non python projects) since python is my naked monalisa for prototyping, then i port it to whatever am writing it in if it works fine..
