Recommendation

Laguna

Alright lads.

I'm looking for a good book to teach PHP & MySQL from the ground up, I'm pretty experienced with ASP and VBScript, but I'd like to learn PHP as, well, it's something else other than Microsoft!. I'm aware there's a plethora of books out there that cover these subjects but I'm hoping you guys could recommend a book you may have found useful in the past. Thanks in advance.

PhantomBeaker

I started with w3schools.com and worked up that way.

Although I have to say that I had learnt my sql in college - but even sitting down with a manual for a database will help. Actually, I find one of the best manuals to be the postgresql manual, it explains most concepts really clearly. If you're using MySQL though be careful, it may not implement everything quite as postgres does, or even implement some of them (although I'm being led to believe it's getting quite complete these days) but the postgres manual does have a damned good introduction (or at least I found it better than the mysql intro).

To be honest, once you can program in one language, you know how to program (let's just ignore for 2 seconds the obvious point that there are different styles like functional programming etc) - a lot of books are designed for people who haven't programmed before. It's just a case of learning the various functions and the like. So you probably won't need much more than w3schools and the php manual if you're familiar with asp.

But that's just my opinion.

Aoife

Syth

I learned from an O'Reilly book. 'Learning PHP 5' AFAIR. It cover SQL as well. Can't go wrong with O'Reilly books.

Cake Fiend

Probably all PHP books will touch on the subject of SQL, given the popularity of their combination, and brief introduction is probably all you'll need for web stuff. If, later, you wanted to learn more about SQL, you could always pick up an SQL-specific book.

O'Reillys are always good sources, as are Sams. Sams have a book called "PHP and MySQL Web Development" that I've heard good things about.