Still fairly new to it, prob been doing it about a month and a half now (although life took a very downward spiral a few weeks back and i stopped, right now im doing it again just to keep sane).

Basically.. I wanna make a server query for a website (as in display how many people are on the server and what kills etc).

No idea where the hell to start! anyone able to help? or failing that anyone know of any free packages that come with a built in one that i could look through and confuse myself with?

Try this:
http://www.codezwiz.com/ftopict-3047-mad-query-php.html

Madquery is the basis of many web based scripts. Depending on how old that code is it may require some changes. I seem to recall things changed a bit with CS:S. At one point the offsets changed in server returned data but it's fairly obvious what goes where if you dump the full data.

An alternative would be to strip the code from HLstats Live Server view function. It doesn't look all that easy though....

Good luck

Cheers for that

Ideally I'm looking for something that can explain what all the functions needed are, and what they all do... reading millions of lines of code trying to pick it out is hard, but so far thats mainly cos all I have to go on are things like HLSTATS which seems to want PERL (which I don't got) or last about 12000 pages.

I'll have a looksy through and check out the various php wiki kinda things and see if i can work out whats going on