Module development and code questions

I have a content type to add youtube videos on the site by just adding the link. From within the theme file for that view, I retrieve the number of likes for each video. Is it possible to sort the view based on the number of likes?

I'm rebuilding a D7 module which allows my customer to build a secondary menu that changes depending on a node attribute. I've used the Menu API to dynamically create a custom menu. Using those custom menus, I've created MenuLinkContent successfully that are attached to them, but they don't appear on the page in the SecondaryMenuBlock I've assigned to the page. 

FYI I think the culprit might be a module named metatag:view.

• Content type for blog articles that are tagged by blog name, category (blog name, category are two separate taxonomy lists).
• View page for blog articles with a relationship and contextual filter for filtering by blog name and category. This works perfectly in preview.
• I created a view for the category list and placed the block on the view page. Can the taxonomy list be used as the menu also? So instead of taxonomy/term/123 can it somehow look at the location such as url /blogs/blog_name/category/categoryname?

We have a site with a few thousand pages which are all in a huge hierarchical menu. Many pages display this menu as a navigation sidebar and each page can be customized so the root of this menu can be the page itself, its parent or its grandparent and set to how many levels of the menu should be displayed.  Did it make sense to put everything in one giant menu? Probably not, but that's what I'm working with.

Hello Community Members !!!

I want to know if there are some books, recommendations around Custom Drupal Code Development /Theme Development if one is starting from scratch

Any links to guides or books will be greatly appreciated.

PS : I am looking to be able to develop for drupal and contribute modules and themes if I find that available modules don't fit client requirements.