Reddit reviews PHP for the World Wide Web, Third Edition

In this order:

1. PHP for the World Wide Web
   
2. PHP 6 and MySQL 5
   
3. PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice and/or PHP Object-Oriented Solutions
   
4. High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More
   
5. Introduction to PHP PDO
   
6. Model-View-Controller MVC

Hey, I briefed over some of the comments here, and while I feel a number of them are useful and necessary, I think you need an actual hard copy book to start with, rather than jumping right the hell into the manuals.

The book I started with, with absolute minimal programming experience (just some C++ classes in high school), is Larry Ullman's PHP book. I started on the second edition, and it was everything I needed to get started programming with PHP and making dynamic applications. It should cover basics of MySQL and top the book off with regular expressions, which are absolutely necessary to any serious web developer, and he makes everything feel very accessible.

After some months of that and programming, you would be ready to enhance your skills, and his follow up Advanced PHP book covers a lot of interesting and esoteric areas. It might be more than you need, but it does start off with some practical chapters in OOP and classes.

In-between the two, he wrote a MySQL and PHP combination book that sort of acts as a stepping stone between the beginner's book and the advanced book, and it might actually be the most you need to program in PHP, but I found the Advanced book handy to use, and the first book I linked you was my personal guide and reference for about a year and a half as I grew in my skill set.

If you have a library card, most libraries carry a lot of beginning PHP books. Most of the systems I look at have this one and there are definitely enough. Just search for php books on amazon and type in some titles...

Also, torrents?