Properly Populating and Retrieving SharePoint Field Data

SharePoint uses a lot of field types that have different underlying schemas, delimiters and formats. I see a lot of people reverse engineer the field information and "hack" the data into the list using a string such as "1;#Title" for a lookup field. Well this isn't exactly best practice so I've put together a reference table below to assist in using the correct data types for populating or retrieving information from a SharePoint list.