Success with Mr. Hess

This post is mainly because I've been playing around with some calculations involving Hess's Law with varying degrees of success. Chances are you were first introduced to these calculations in some type of general chemistry class or even high school, and problems provided a series of reactions that could be fit jigsaw puzzle style together to make the total enthalpy of formation of the desired chemical equation.  Now low and behold, the problems start withholding more of the puzzle pieces! Oh no!

Here is an example: 

Calculate (the enthalpy of formation) for methane with the given data: 

To calculate this, we first write down the desired chemical equation: 

Then we use the various enthalpy of combustion of both the products and reactants to find enthalpy of formation for methane. 

This is a rather tedious process, but hopefully a comprehensive one.