Whats the best crash-course introduction to PHP & MySQL?”
I went to Amazon.com and checked out several of their top-selling PHP/MySQL books. Their #1 top-selling book for PHP/MySQL looks to be a winner. It’s called PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide (2nd Edition). The author is Larry Ullman. It’s hard to be sure it’s the absolute best book on the subject based on just the reviews, but this book seems to be highly recommended by those who have used it as a way to quickly learn PHP and MySQL. There were a few other highly rating books but they were from 2004. With any type of technical book, I always try to stick with more recent stuff. This book was published in 2005. There were some books that are VERY new, but I didn’t recommend those because they only have a small number of reader reviews.
If you want to try to learn PHP for free, try W3Schools. They are an excellent tutorial site. Their PHP tutorial can be found here: http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp I’d recommend going the slightly more expensive route and buying a great book, PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Welling. It’s really a great book and you will learn great PHP from it.
