[Hampshire] [OT] Best PHP and MySQL Tutorials Sought

A friend has asked me to ask you this so I will.

I told my friend to sign up but he won't - in his defence his job does
entail reading about a million emails a day! Okay, bit of an
exaggeration, but take it from someone who has glimpsed his mailbox and
knows his workload I know where he is coming from.

I have pointed him in the direction of w3c for php and the MySQL
documentation, but if you do have any other good tips I will pass them on.

TIA

Sean

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Hi!

Wonder if you would be kind enough to do me one [hopefully] quick favour please?

If you still have access to HantsLug, would you be kind enough to post a quick question to the mailing list for me? I'm getting back into some PHP coding, to experiment with a new little idea I've had... Basically I'd like to bring my skills up to date. I'm very comfortable coding with the PHP4.3.X releases and MySQL4.x databases. Though I come from a procedural programming background, I did migrate my existing site over to an OO paradigm with reasonable success [the architecture wasn't "purist", but it worked well enough].

I'm now looking to try out a couple of new ideas, but would like to bring the coding bang up to date. So I'm looking for a primer that will serve to get me from PHP4 to PHP5 and to working extensively with databases [preferably directly, not via PEAR as this idea is performance-critical].

I'd be grateful if anyone out there could recommend a book or books that would take someone with a reasonable grasp of programming, a PHP4 grounding and a mostly intact brain and get them to familiarity with PHP5 and a good grounding in the principles of PHP5/OO at the same time. I'm particularly interested in the interaction of PHP with MySQL5.X...

Finally, if it isn't too much to ask, how about something of a reasonable primer or guide in good database design. I can just about muddle my way to 3NF [if you don't look too closely] but it would be nice to get a more reasonable grounding. Without diverting into details, I know that my data model is going to be reasonably complex, but if it's structured well, it's going to make the wrapped code incredibly powerful. So I'm looking for principles that will walk me through the basics and then help me understand the finer points of foreign keys, complex joins, and so on. So nothing particularly academic... but a willingness on my part to learn so that I don't design my way into common pitfalls.

Basically anything the LUGgers would care to offer in the way of advice would be gratefully received...

Tx

C

</request>