Real life example of using Query Bindings needed

I'm so proud it only took me 10 mins. to login with all the robot checks, etc. Now on to my question. Is there a real life example of how to do this:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM some_table WHERE id IN ? AND status = ? AND author = ?";
$this->db->query($sql, array(array(3, 6), 'live', 'Rick'));

In a real program you will not be hard-coding what is fed into a query, but this is the example on the website. How would I replace those hard-coded values with variables? Where do I store the quotes, inside the variable or outside or some other way?

Here is what my sql statement looks like:
"SELECT * FROM ? WHERE casenum = '?' AND defname LIKE '?%' AND defname LIKE '%,_?%' ORDER BY evDate desc";

The error: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ''?' WHERE casenum = '?' AND defname LIKE '?%' AND defname LIKE '%,_?%' ORDER BY ' at line 1