Queries and Hooks...?

[StepOnFrog]

Hi all,

These following questions *might* make some people's eyeballs jump out from shock when reading them (I expect my questions are a bit noob-like)!

I have taken a big interest in messing around with vBulletin style & code since I first bought the package, it was vB 3.5.4 (possibly about 2 or 3 years ago). From then I was getting to grips with MySQL and PHP too.

I'm now at the stage of learning where I want to write MODs for vBulletin, but I have come across a few stumbling blocks, and is probably the place where your eyeballs jump out in shock!

I've searched all over for tutorials on what I want to know, but haven't found much, really. My searches brought me to this board, where I found a tutorial on the datastore, but, as I understand it, the datastore is for data that isn't updated that often, so not much need for my MOD...

I would like to know about writing queries through vBulletin, for example,

$query = $db-> blah blah blah blah and so on...

what is the $db-> part of the code, and why not just use a straight forward query for MySQL? Particularly, I'd like to know about the functions in vBulletin that allow us to access, write to and update the database, please?????

Also, I believe it is necessary to learn about the HOOKs in vBulletin, how they are used and why, so any help here would be great too!

I feel daft asking for this help, but have a look around yourselves, see if you can find anything with regards the essential parts of vBulletin programming (IMO, the basics would be the database queries and the HOOK system - the stuff that enables your code to run with vBulletin).

I'm running vBulletin 3.7.2.

Any help and/or advice is greatly received,
Thanks in advance,
Step
;-D