www.php.net is of course the fountainhead of all PHP goodness. Like MySQL, PHP has extensive online manuals that make almost any book redundant. When in doubt, go to www.php.net and browse the manual.
The Visual Quickstart Guide PHP for the World Wide Web and Visual Quickpro Guide PHP Advanced for the World Wide Web, both written by Larry Ullman, were my beginner's guides. The first suffers just a bit from the "this is a text editor" disease, but you can skip ahead, right?
PHP Essentials by Julie Meloni was a breakthrough. It gave me all the vital bits that Ullman left out of his first book. Read more then buy this book! I've seen her code showing up in a lot of web pages -- unmodified -- without giving her nearly the credit she deserves. SimpleshoPHP would not exist if I hadn't found Meloni's tutorial bookstore.
O'Reilly's PHP Cookbook was just reviewed on Slashdot; fortunately I already had my copy. There is a lot of PHP magic in there, though much of it is over my head (and there are a lot of object-oriented distractions). I imagine I'll be revisiting the Cookbook as more feature requests come in (and more sillybuggers show me how insecure my code is). But the one feature I tried to apply directly out of the Cookbook didn't work at all, so I have to take their recipes with a pinch of salt.
The online manual for MySQL at www.mysql.com is comprehensive beyond anything I have seen for any project. I was ordered to buy MySQL by Paul DuBois (and got stuck with the first edition, which is positively ancient), but found little in it that is not more easily found in the amazing online manual.
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