Programming in small doses?

Maybe programming in small doses is the antidote to this Joomla! user's problems:

"I found Joomla very frustrating though. I installed the dummy template site that comes with the distribution, a site about soccer teams. I wanted to remove the frames in the site, change the background images and colors, and otherwise set up a small publishing site with news and blogs. I was unable to do a lot of this without digging in directly to the css, which is of course far too much to ask a common user. I spent several hours with this, learning how the interface work and making backend changes, and mostly gave up out of frustration and lack of time to devote."

That's why I'm focusing on code snippets. Little pieces of stand alone code that do a small task that you can learn from.

A forum or library of code snippets does seems to be in the making over at the official Joomla org.