PHPBuilder.com has a new basic tutorial introducing you to the world of the powerful combination of Oracle and PHP:

This article is for the developer who wants to use the PHP scripting language with an Oracle database to develop their application. PHP is one of the most commonly used scripting languages, as it is open source and has procedural as well as object-oriented capabilities. Oracle is a popular RDBMS and that's the reason this combination is very useful for web-based application development.

The article talks about the OCI8 extension and gives a sample of its use to connect to a remote machine (using a full TNSNAMES-formatted string for the host). The code is explained a bit from the connect down to the oci_close.