As a part of their PHP 101 series, Zend has posted their latest section - PHP 101 (part 8): Databases and Other Animals.

One of the most compelling things PHP has going for it is its support for a variety of RDBMS, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and Microsoft Access(via ODBC). By virtue of this support, PHP developers can create sophisticated data-driven Web applications at a fraction of the time and cost required by competing alternatives. And nowhere is this more clear than in PHP's longtime support of MySQL, the very fast, very reliable and very feature-rich open-source RDBMS.

[...] In this issue of PHP 101, I'm going to show you how to use PHP to extract data from a database, and use that data to dynamically build a Web page. In order to try out the examples in this tutorial, you'll need a working MySQL installation, which you can obtain from the MySQL Web site at http://www.mysql.com/. If you have some knowledge of SQL (Structured Query Language, the language used to interact with a database server) you'll find it helpful, but it's not essential.

This lengthy tutorial seems to cover just about everything my might bee looking for - all the way from the basics of creating tables and inserting data into them, up to the integration of a SQL query with your HTML to produce dynamic content. The next step from here would be to move into some of the more technical SQL functionality like JOINs, aliases, and WHERE clause additions (but that's a different article...)