I have a pretty good collection of books on PHP. This is the best of the group. It covers both PHP and MySQL in a manner that a novice (who understands HTML) can gather but covers the subjects in a reasonable depth. I particulary like that the authors have managed to make the book both a reference and a tutorial and have done a good job of both. It's not the end all of books on the subject but it is probably the best single volume reference out there.