DevShed has started a new series looking at working with PHP and databases with this new tutorial posted today, an excerpt from the O'Reilly book "Programming PHP, Second Edition".

We focus on the PEAR DB system, which lets you use the same functions to access any database, rather than on the myriad database-specific extensions. In this chapter, you'll learn how to fetch data from the database, how to store data in the database, and how to handle errors. We finish with a sample application that shows how to put various database techniques into action.

In this first part of the series, they look at what kinds of things are possible with the database connection, some of the basics of using the PEAR DB class and working with data source names to help with the connection.