gives a good start, however borrowing a book from the library and going through doesn’t hurt either. Then just get a host with PHP capabilities or load Apache/MySQL/PHP on your machine and hack away. It will take a little while but hang in there. It’s well worth it once you get it figured out.

go to their manual pages:

I have been working in both for years and religiously use those sites, especially to check arguement order.

is a great resource for php tutorials, scripts, etc.