Basic SQL query question

I realize this is really basic, I'm learning as I go.

I'm trying to make a simple page to add data to a database. The database is named 'php', and I have a table with: id (int, auto increment) and text fields named lastname, firstname, org, cdate and notes.

My form input is a quick table, the inputs look like this:

<td width="100">Lastname</td>
<td><input name="lastname" type="text" id="lastname"></td>

So I assume that's posting "lastname".

I've defined these variables to grab the post data:

$lastname = $_POST['lastname'];
$firstname = $_POST['firstname'];
$org = $_POST['org'];
$cdate = $_POST['cdate'];
$notes = $_POST['notes'];

And here's my query:

// Add the info
$query = "INSERT INTO users (lastname, firstname, org, cdate, notes) VALUES ('$lastname', '$firstname', '$org', '$cdate', '$notes')";
mysql_query($query) or die('Error, insert query failed');

Which as you can guess, doesn't work. I'm reading and googling, but right now I'm kind of stuck at this point and not sure what I'm missing. If anyone could enlighten me, I'd really appreciate it.

[calorie]

Replace the query line with this to see the error being generated:

mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());

Also, it is generally not a good idea to insert GPC data directly. See example 1396 on this page for how to escape data.

Aah, thanks.

Access denied; you need the RELOAD privilege for this operation

That's the error I get with the actual output string. I'll definitely check that page out, right now I'm just trying to get the hang of things.

Edit: Woohoo! I got it!

That error is because I'm going by the O'Reilly book and was flushing privelages after the submit. Honestly I don't even know what it does (hehehe) so I dumped it and it works now.

Thank you very much!