DevShed is getting back down to some of the basics with this new tutorial - the first part of a three-part series looking at connecting PHP with a MySQL database backend. The article is part of an excerpt from the O'Reily book "Learning PHP and MySQL" (by Michele Davis and Jon Phillips).

In this first part of a three-part series. you will begin learning how to use PHP to display and modify data from a MySQL database.

They step through the process of connecting to the database server, picking the database you want to work with, creating a SELECT statement for the data in the tables, running it and getting back the information. For this first part of the series, though, they only go as far as making the connection including the solution to one of the most common errors people experience - the "call to undefined function" problem.