database maintenance

I have a question that has been bothering me for some
time, but I'm not sure exactly how to ask the question
so I will explain my challenge and hope that I am
clear enough.  

I wanted to present something on my personal webpages
hosted on a free webserver. HTML and CSS are a breeze
and working with javascript comes easy to me.  I have
learned these things on my own but I now need to be
pointed in the right direction as to what I need to
learn to conquer my problem explained below:  

At one of these pages, I have been maintaining a list
of vistors' recommended books for a while now.  

I get input from visitors two ways.  One is to add a
book to the list and the other is to add their "vote"
to a book already recommended and listed.  I receive
this information by email via a form I created. Upon
receipt, I manually type in a new row and input the
information with a new name value for the form.  Each
time I receive a vote for a book, I similarly go in
and increase the vote and then move the row around the
table through cut and paste so the list remains sorted
by books with the most votes.  

So, to my question:  Is there a better way to
accomplish a similar thing without so much maintenance
work.  I hear acronyms like PHP or SQL, which means
nothing to me, but I'm willing to teach myself if they
are what I need to learn.  

I recently did a search for databases applications and
the descriptions alone were incomprehensible to me. 
Freeware that will "execute the SELECT statements it
finds and displays the result to the standard output
as a professional looking, nice HTML page."  sounds
hopeful, but ?

The page I'm talking about is here:
http://www.geocities.com/shire_cl/Books/books.html

I would appreciate it if someone could point in the
right direction on what I could look into this further
or even tell what technical field I'm looking at. 
Thank you so much for your patience in reading this
and for any direction you can offer me. 

Fran

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