Reddit reviews PHP Cookbook: Solutions and Examples for PHP Programmers

In my opinion, both PHP and Ruby can work well for this.

Were you to use PHP, I'd recommend a framework anyway, something along the lines of Laravel (my favorite at the moment).

This effectively gets you the same general framework tools that you would have using Ruby on Rails. I disagree that RoR would be "too much" for this project, it can be heavyweight, but it is that way to help you create your application faster, not because it has an over abundance of features.

The advantage of PHP is that there are a great deal more choices for hosting your project than with Ruby. That said, there are great choices for hosting Ruby as well - just not as many of them.

I would look at the two languages and get a sense of which you'd be more productive in off the bat. My guess is that would be PHP, because although more people are moving to using template engines like Twig, you can still mix PHP into HTML extremely easily In my opinion, that lets you experiment faster than you can with Ruby.

If you chose PHP, I'd recommend the PHP Cookbook http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0596101015 - it's a touch older now, but it contains very helpful learn-by-solving-a-problem recipes that can get you familiar with the basics of the language quickly.

If you're a more academic learner, you might try the more rote Programming PHP http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1449392776/ref=pd_aw_sims_2?pi=SL500_SY115 - which covers a lot more basics, but doesn't solve as many problems. Still, teaches a lot of the core language.

From there I'd work through tutorials on whatever framework you chose so you can get a sense of the patterns that framework uses. In conjunction with building your core knowledge of PHP, you'll start moving pretty quickly.

PHP Cookbook is the book I would recommend. It has examples for almost everything.