Vincent Rocks. 🙂 Always helpful and encouraging. I would have given up trying to get past the learning curve for this all if it wasn't for him.
I have a little C++ programming under my belt, so PHP was pretty easy to get to intermediate level. I mention that because I am going to suggest a book and I thought it was the best tutorial out there. But it might not cater to programming supernewbies.
The book is 'PHP and MySQL Web Development' by Sams Publishing. ISBN 0-672-31784-2. Around $35 at Amazon.com before shipping. It starts off with 5 chapters of PHP tutorials from newbie to advanced, then 6 chapters of MySQL from newbie to advanced. Then the rest of the book is devoted to melding those skills to practical web applications. Includes a CD with all the source working.
Just yesterday I installed a webserver on my computer and then PHP and MySQL - which allows me to do my exercises and work at home without having to upload anything. Check out my recent posts and the replies in the Install Help forum if you want advice on that.
Let me tell you what NOT to do. Don't buy the 'Learn MySQL in 21 days' book by Sams. It was so bad and full of typos that I almost swore off ever buying one of Sam's books again. The typos were so bad so early on that even I with absolutely NO MySQL experience could see the errors. So I setup a Linux box with MySQL server and client so I could experiment. I couldn't get the examples to work on their either without tweaking. Examples on the text would say things like: Look above to see what happens when you type this - and the example would be something close but not quite... It actually helped make me better at MySQL. So maybe that was their intent. Sell a crappy book with lots of typos that aren't so bad that you can't figure them out eventually. I called their tech support and asked for a listing of the errors so I could print them out and work from there. He said there was none and that he said if I was that mad I should return the book to them for refund. Argh!
Anyways, back to positive things... Vincent mentioned the front end, it helps make things prettier and easier to layout. If you have direct access to the MySQL database on a server, then MySQLFront is the way to go (do a search for it on google).
That's about it. Good luck!
-Eric-
