I feel so overwhelmed...

I've been wanting to learn how to do this for a long time, but haven't found the time because of school and work and because it would probably take me twice as long as any other person. I just don't have the mind to program. Grew up with the GUI based OS's, I get lost in Unix and Dos environments.

Anyway, my site DC Domain is still done the manual way. I edit the .html page and reupload everytime. It gets pretty time consuming and I've been wanting to learn how to program some sort of web-based update script. Somewhere along the lines of logging into an administration side, add a new entry and have it automatically appear on the page.

To accomplish this, I would need to use a database right? I read that you can also do the same thing using text files? Instead of going the right way and try to learn how to program from the ground up, I'm trying to 'cheat' and find some scripts online to accomplish the same thing. That's how I learned HTML and the returns are a little quicker which keeps you learning.

I'm not sure what I should be looking for and what's good and what's bad. I've been looking at some of the sites provided by the other members in this forum and am I looking at Content Management scripts? Or News Publishing? The news publishing ones seem to be more of what I'm looking for and a lot simpler. I'm looking for something among the lines of PHP and mySQL or PHP and text files. Does anyone have a script they recommend. I'm just overwhelmed by the amount of scripts out there.

Sorry if I come off as lazy, but I've tried sitting down and learning the code from the ground up at Web-Monkey, and I just feel that I'm not moving fast enough.

At school I signed up for the advanced lab for a Publishing on the World Wide Web class and the professor is having us learn PERL and then migrating over to ASP. Access then over to mySQL. I hear PERL is similar to PHP and I'm getting scared now because I'm working on my first assignment, a very simple one and I'm totally lost already.