What is the best Drupal tool for ???

Now it's time to start creating/migrating content...

But what type of Drupal construct should I use for my various needs?

I would appreciate advice from more experienced users as to the "right tool" for the following tasks..

Context: I am a university lecturer and want my Drupal powered website to contain teaching-related, research-related and personal (family) content...

An easy one: I teach Java programming, and want to put my Java materials onto Drupal in an organized fashion so that they can gradually build into a useful reference resource for my students.. so I assume that the correct type of Drupal construct is the "book".

Now some others for which I don't really know the right way to build...

(1) I have quite a number of pages that present combinatorial data for researchers to download .. often there will be a table of links, each linking to a datafile (just a plain text file in a special format) that I expect to be downloaded by those interested. Some of the datafiles can be quite big. Once constructed, these pages are essentially static in that the data does not change.

(2) Similarly I have a number of pages that present "the state of the art" in a specific topic; these are frequently updated as new discoveries are made, or theorems are proved. The user returning to the page may wish to see the current status and possibly the history of what happened in what order.

(2a) I often work on a problem, make some minor progress, and then give up. When I come back to it, I have no record of this or the programs that I used. I would like to be able to present these "works in progress" online to encourage others to solve the problem, send suggestions etc.

(3) I have two children, one toddler and one baby.. I want to put photos, drawings, cute sayings etc for the grandparents living overseas, and for us to look back through...

(4) I want to keep track of my own tricks and tips for various technical things.... partly to help others and partly so that I can remember next time just HOW I install DarwinPorts on MacOS X (or whatever), exactly what IP address my broadband router has and so on. These are often found on people's blogs and I find them very useful myself. So, I assume a blog is the right tool for this one.

(5) [Getting harder now] I actually have some datasets that are stored in a mySQL database and for which I have written PHP scripts for searching and so on. Can I incorporate these into Drupal or is it too hard to do "PHP within PHP" and I should just link to them from Drupal and keep them in their existing location?

(6) I have some much simpler PHP scripts that do elementary combinatorial tasks .. just read in forms data and process it once and output the answers.. can THEY be incorporated INTO Drupal or again should I just keep them separate?

Basically at this stage, I'd just like an experienced opinion on WHICH structure/tools I should investigate, learn and use.. I'm happy to go and learn HOW to use them (with suitable help) but at the moment I'm just after a sort of global overview of the right general approach..

Cheers

Gordon

PS What controls the effect of an HTML tag.. I used "pre" and "/pre" in a post on this forum and got a nice little outlined "code" box. But when I did this on my own Drupal thing, I just got pre-formatted text in the usual font with no nice outlines/shading. Is this a "theme" thing?