I first started from a tutorial on SitePoint.com back last summer (June 2000 or so) - it was a fantastic tutorial by Kevin Yank, which has since been converted to a book.
If you can find a spare $35 (or whatever the book costs, not quite certain) then it is definitely 100% recommended - go to
http://www.sitepoint.com and there are links there. The book is called 'Building a Database Driven Site Using PHP & MySQL" or similar.