Of all of the things included with the PHP distributions these days, PEAR is one of the best, especially for someone that's just starting out. For those that don't know what this is:
PEAR is short for "PHP Extension and Application Repository" and is pronounced just like the fruit. The purpose of PEAR is to provide: a structured library of open-sourced code for PHP users, a system for code distribution and package maintenance, and a standard style for code written in PHP.

PEAR can help out even the beginners out there, but only if you know how to use it. This new tutorial from CodeWalkers.com (the same people that bring you the biweekly PHP coding contest) shows you how to get started with one of the most common features of PEAR, the database functionality. They run you through several of the functions and their return values that you might want to use, and that make connecting to and reading from just about any database out there easy. That's one of the other good things about PEAR - the abstraction layers it provides. Because it's on just about any PHP distribution anywhere, you can use it to run your scripts on any machine and any database you choose.