Members area

Hi All, I'm about to start development on a members area for a site. The members area will have 2 levels - Paid & Free, with the Paid members having access to more pages. I have not created a members area before & am after any advice or links I can get... I think a lot of reading is in order... Particularly: - DB structure & fields (I'll be using MySQL if that's relevant) - Sessions (I've seen quite a few threads covering sessions over the last couple of months, so should have some links in my 'inbox' somewhere... But the more the merrier...) - Any PHP suggestions/advice/links - Anything else you can think is relevant... Thanks, this will be a big help. Cheers, Gav