Hi there all...I am a coder php/mysql/js 5+ yrs - and a muso

- but I have no experience in coding anything specifically for mambo/joomla yet...I'm new to VirtueMart and currently just trying to get a shop up and happening at my bands site
http://www.beatels.com. I came across a bug/feature

with the tax on shipping and came here searching for enlightenment. I saw the pleadings for someone to code this into a module and felt that I should say hello.
I've built web apps, intranets - even an order system for a telco that calls prices for customer orders from the wholesale supplier's website. Sounds kinda deja-vu to me...
I'm not expecting a huge amount of trade at our site - it's more of a service for our audience - so I've just created a bunch of shipping rates that covers most but not all of the possibilities. But the thought of being able to calculate shipping via AusPost by calling up their postage calculator (which I stupidly did by hand) from within the code does seem like a highly attractive/sensible way of doing things

I was really planning on doing other things in the few weeks I have spare before other duties call. But if it turns out that an Auspost module could be done in a short amount of time, I *may* be able to help.
One minor obstace is the fact that I have no idea of how mambo/joomla works in a *developer* sense - names of global variables, which class calls which, etc. I also have no idea how to write a module for mambo/joomla. Then again, I have never actually
wanted to know until now. If someone could steer me in the right direction (good tutorials or tips from one of the virtuemart developers) for some of the above, I could at least assess whether I can help out with this...
On a slightly-related matter, I reported elsewhere in this forum that, although my standard shipping module was not adding tax to shipping costs, I had found that by manually updating the mos_vm_shipping_rate table shipping_rate_vat_id with the id from the tax rate you wished to use for that shipping rate, I was able to at least get tax added to shipping where applicable. Hope that helps anybody with the same problem.
Undeniably, it's an ugly solution, and I began to wonder if I should just fix the code myself. But that would mean I would need to get to know 'coding for mambo/joomla', which as I have said before, I
had been avoiding...
"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" John Lennon