Module development and code questions

I'm developing my own groups module. I've got a mysql table with group members (with a group id column and a member id column), and a group info mysql table with all the information regarding each group. I want to output a table with the name, date created, and number of members for each group. I also want to be able to sort on each of the headings. I got everything working, but I don't like the way the member count works. The problem is that the number of members is updated AFTER it's sorted. Can anybody please suggest a better way?
Here's what I have:
<?php
function group_groups_home()
{
$sql = "SELECT group_info.gid, group_info.title, group_info.nid, group_info.created, group_info.members FROM (group_info)";

$header = array(
array('data' => t('Group Name'), 'field' => 'title', 'width' => '100%'),
array('data' => t('Created'), 'field' => 'created', 'align' => 'center'),
array('data' => t('Members'), 'field' => 'members', 'align' => 'center')
);

$rows = array();

$sql .= tablesort_sql($header);
$result = pager_query($sql, 20);

while ($group = db_fetch_object($result)) {
// I don't like the way this is done, but this is the only way I could figure out how to sort by membercount
$membercount = mysql_num_rows(db_query("SELECT * FROM (group_members) WHERE group_members.gid = '%d'", $group->gid));

I want to make a content type called "example site" on www.drupalecommerce.com. I want it to have 4 fields like:
url
who made it
what modules it demonstrates
what else it demonstrates: themes, etc.

Hi ,

Are there any recommended books for module developers which explains
drupal architecture in detail ?

If not is anyone thinking of writing such a book ?

Regards
Paul

I'm new at this... just wondering if anybody could point me in the direction of enabling / turning on a toolbar/line with bold/itallic/link/image and so forth for use in creating a page, block, etc.... It must be possible?

I have a site with a great deal of nodes that want to appear on the front page, so I wrote a natty little module which just displays the titles neatly ordered in columns, and grouped by user.

Since about the same time my hosting provider was complaining to me that I was using far too much disc space, I decided to optimise things by using straight SQL to recover the node information I wanted (thus avoiding multiple calls to node_api etc etc).

This works great, the front page now loads much faster than it did, except.... my URL aliases have of course disappeared.

I am having a problem sorting number fields created using Flexinode for Drupal 4.6. When I'm viewing the data in the Table or tabular view, numbers do not sort properly.

For example: Number Field 1 sorted ascending
1000
3
5

Is there a fix for this problem? Does Flexinode for 4.7 work better at sorting numbers?

Thanks.