Generate Pages by username with php and mysql

[mcslug]

Thanks for reading everyone. I'm new to PHP and MYSQL, I've gotten pretty good with it over the last month or so but I'm stuck on something. I've created my own content management type of a site, but I want to set it up so a user can view another users publicly viewable webpage.

Right now I'm doing authentication against a mysql database, I want a user to be able to type into a browser something like:
[a href=\"http://mysite.com/bob\" target=\"_blank\"]http://mysite.com/bob[/a]

and have that query the database for information about bob which will be posted to a default page.

I'm using IIS 6, php5 and mysql

I thought I could use URL parameter passing to do that, so I could set a variable equal to whatever was typed in at the end of the string, in this case bob, but I don't know enough about url parameters or understand them enough to even know if my thinking is correct there.

Any help is greatly appreciated, even if it's just telling me the topic that I'm looking for and I'll go look it up, I just don't even know what something like this would be titled.