Mice are merely the protrusion into our dimension of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who, unbeknownst to the human race, are the most intelligent species on the planet Earth. They spent a lot of their time in laboratories running complex experiments on humans.
I liked the books of Charles Petzold: Programming in the Key of C# and Programming Microsoft Windows with C#. I don't know if they are up to date but I think they provide a basic overview.
AFAIK drupal stores passwords as MD5 hash. This isn't too save, but better than plain text.