Thanks for all the welcomes chaps. Very heartening.

I'm currently hooking up a 3 axis stepper driver board (yep, the dreaded chinese cheapy), a small stepper (Aliexpress.com : Buy Best selling Nema 17 series hybrid stepping motor 42BYGHW609 40mm 3.4V 1.7A 3400g.cm 4wires from Reliable stepper motor suppliers on Wantmotor Official Store - 8 US bucks - sheesh!) and an old PC PSU. Just going to write a bit of Perl code with this: Device::ParallelPort - search.cpan.org to do a bit of messing about - just want to learn about this stuff from the basics before confusing myself with EMC or something.