Hello everyone.

I was hoping to find out what resources people have used to learn some of the basics of PHP and SQL or something along those lines.
I'm quite interested in purchasing a good book to have a read through to give me some more base knowledge to build upon.

Some of the tutorials posted are great for individual applications but as a beginner to the language I find it hard to work out exactly what each part is doing (even with good commenting) and how I can use the same knowledge in different applications.

I just stumbled across this.

http://www.phpbuddy.com/


I was in fact looking for this book.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/MySQL-Dynamic-Visu...7633&sr=8-1

There is probably a more up to date version of it. But honestly, this book tells you what the code does then shows you how to use it. You learn while coding instead of being bombarded by theory. Its pretty good.

Well, there's the mother of all resources: http://www.php.net

And w3c also has some good tuts....

Bit of a cliche but for bare basics I used PHP for dummies from O'reilly and then moved onto a cookbook or two. Once you get the basics PHP really just starts to 'click' and you can delve into some deeper topics.

The w3schools site is definitely one of the better beginner resources.

If you want to splash a bit of cash there's always lynda.com's video tutorials

http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modListing.asp?sid=99

There are also certain videos that you can view for free

Something to note. Once you have the basic syntax down it really isn't a big leap to look into various functions on php.net. See what they do then incorporate them into your coding.

Cool thanks for your replies.
I ordered a copy of the updated version of Larry Ullman's book.