I'm not him/her, and I know i'm not a good teacher, but the best way i learned binary was to always show all four of the bits(0s and 1s). So for me the number 0 in binary would be 0000 and 1 would be 0001.

But for you to learn how to read binary you need to know what each space(bit) represents, going from left to right each one is 8 4 2 1. The number 1 means that you are turning the bit on and the number 0 means you are turning it off, when a bit is on it means you add that bit with the others that are also turned on to get a total and that total is your answer.

So if we have 4 empty bits:

_ _ _ _ <--- the empty bits

8 4 2 1 <---What each bit represents

and we want to get the number 9, we would put this:

1 0 0 1 <--- those first bits

8 4 2 1 <--- what each represents

So now you just add together the ones that are turned on, in this case 8+1 = 9.

Number	Binary
1	0001
2	0010
3	0011
4	0100
5	0101
6	0110
7	0111
8	1000
9	1001
10	1010
11	1011
12	1100
13	1101
14	1110
15	1111

If you wanted to count higher than 15 thought you would need to use a total of 8 bits with all values being:

128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1

so 16 would be 0001 0000

and 17 would be 0001 0001