Seeing as your interest in making a huge interactive text game, i believe starting out with PhP/MYsql combination would set you on the right track the fastest. Let's see, to get the hang of PhP i erally recommend this tutorial. It gives a prime look at PhP and it has a section on MySQL as well. Starting out with that, i believe you might just get to programming a text-based web game. Good luck with your programming. (i will also be able to help out with some stuff if you ask me) The things that will be hard, is how to test the things without a remote host... I recommend you get Bizzar server if you are running windows 2K/XP as it is great, and runs Apache/PhP/mysql and comes with the PhPMyAdmin tool.