I recently ordered a Uno board and breadboard and I am getting ready to start playing. My eventual goal is a flash timer/trigger with a seven segment display to display the delay and some up down buttons to adjust the delay. I know there is stuff out there on this but I really want to learn and do it myself. I ordered a seven segment and a MC14489B with the Uno, looking here it seems the preferred driver is the MAX7219, but i have this and I think it will work. Looking over the datasheet (link below) it doesn't seem to difficult to use and I understand what it needs. What I am having trouble understanding is how you have Arduino output a specific byte that I can define as ones and zeros. It seems the serial.write is the way to go but I don't see anything about how to do that. For example it looks like to change the display I would want to change one output from high to low, send 3 specific bytes over the serial out and then change the other output back to high. I would also need a clock output running at the same frequency as the serial output.
http://www.freescale.com/files/timing_interconnect_access/doc/inactive/MC14489B.pdf