Search for Information, creating a website Options

[msking]

A friend and I are looking into creating a website where we would like to be able to have users login and have like a personalized page based on their location. I need to find information on a couple things and I was hoping all you webmasters out there could direct me to some online tutorials and stuff.

1. I need to know how to have a user database with stored information and a way for people to be able to log in and out and create new login profiles with specific information.

2. I would like to know how to display a special page when a user logs in that shows information based on their country, state/province, county, or city- depending on what information they provide when signing up.

Basically, I'm wanting to do something similar to yahoo with user profiles and "My Personalized" pages (only without the user being able to choose what they want). And please don't get me wrong here- I'm not asking anyone to tell me how to do this, I'm just looking for links to tutorials and stuff so I can read up on it and do it myself. I know it would be WAY to much work to ask for someone to just teach me how to do this. Thanks to anyone who can help!