Recomendations?

[Anon]

Hello,
I'm new to this board and PHP. I can program in HTML, ASP, DHTML, VBScript, JavaScript, etc so I'm hoping that learning PHP will be fairly easy (hoping being the key word). I just inheritted a website that is programmed in PHP and the customer is not interested in changing that, which I can understand. Can you experienced PHP gods recommend a quality PHP programming tool and a newbie-to-intermediate book? I understand that PHP can be written using notepad, but I'd like the assistance of an IDE while learning the new syntax. There's quite a variety of tools on the market, and I'd like to start with the best, not the worst. I'd also appreciate and info you could share on MySQL resources. Tools, books, websites, any info would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[tomhath]

The move to php should be easy for you, it's much cleaner than ASP to work in.

Download the manual and read through a couple of tutorials. That's really all you need. I kind of like the Coriolis "Black Book" and O'Reilly "Webmaster in a Nutshell".

Using an IDE is a personal preference. I usually find them hard to work in, although MIcrosoft has made them pretty much required when COM is involved; but you probably won't do COM with php anyway.