Please point me in the right direction

Greetings, I need to create a secure customer section on my site. User name and login would take you to a secured page that displays information like a calendar, downloads, budgets. These sections would be the same but each customer would display custom content (over 100 customers). I browsed php & mysql books, but need a jump start. Any ideas? Is php not the best solution? If you can't tell, I'm a newbie. David