[Chris M]

A good place to start would be the Online Manual at http://www.php.net/

Once you have a basic understanding of PHP it won't seem so daunting...

Another thing you could try is just opening up vB files, and scanning over sections of code, picking them apart, and trying to figure out what each part of the code does - Once you can identify about 60% of the code that you select to understand, you can then begin to get an understanding of how vBulletin works...

Finally, upon downloading of a hack, review the code yourself, and like with the standard vB code, try and examine each part of the hack code, to identify what it does and how it does it...

After a month or so of doing this, you will begin to understand how code works and therefore be able to hack with ease, and also create your own

Satan