>
> 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.
When I moved from procudural programming to OOP with PHP 5, I found the
best learning resource was simply the PHP manual [1]. It gives you a
detailed step-by-step walkthrough, with great code examples showing you
what happens and why. There are also plenty of user comments with further
examples that help make things clear.
> I'm particularly interested in the interaction of PHP with MySQL5.X...
Again, anything and everything you need to know about PHP's interaction
with MySQL is explained really well in the manual [2]. As far as I'm
aware, the actual PHP used to interact with MySQL 5.x is no different to
MySQL 4.x, it's just the SQL used in the mysql_query function that can
differ.
If you learn better from a physical book, I've always found the Visual
Quickstart/Quickpro series from Peachpit Press fantastic.
Hope that's useful,
Mark
[1]
http://uk2.php.net/zend-engine-2.php
[2]
http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/book.mysql.php
