A group of friends and I are designing a mudd game. My bro and I are the programmers for this game. We are having a hard time trying to figure out what kinda engine to build for this game. The game is going to be like Gemstone as far as looks and play. Any of you know any books that would have some ideas on game engines. Thank you

You would do better to ask at Mudconnector or something. Or go to ftp.game.org and browse the tree of derived code bases. You are unlikely to find a decent book on the subject since it's such a niche area, although you could take a look at MUD Game Programming by Ron Penton (although I have no idea what it's like). You should probably start off programming a simple echo server, and then evolving it into a chat server, and then making it in to a full mud later. Many beginning programming books with a networking section will cover echo/chat servers. My only other real advice to you would be to use a language like Python for the program as it's better suited to text processing and networking than C++. Java would also be a better choice.