Hex Bit Pattern to IEEE 754 standard Floating Point Number
A good start is to expand the hex representation into binary like how you did it.


  0000 1100 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000


Then parse the word:


the left-most bit is the sign bit
the next 8 bits represent the biased-exponent
the last bits represent the fractional part with the "hidden one"



  0 | 00011000 | 00000000000000000000000


Then, follow: 




s represents the sign bit
evaluate the binary representation of the exponent to decimal
subtract the bias from the exponent (bias for single-precision is 127 and 1023 for double-precision)
evaluate the normalized form to decimal and you have your floating point decimal number


I hope this helps. It took me a while to understand encoding and decoding using IEEE-754. Slow and steady wins the race.