The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted giving you a "Pokemon Crash Course" on CouchDB, the popular NoSQL database. The "Pokemon" part comes in related to the data the tutorial uses to show you common operations and the use of a PHP interface to perform them.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through working with CouchDB, a NoSQL database from Apache. This tutorial will focus more on the practical side, so we won’t cover what CouchDB is good for, how to install it, why use it, etc. We’ll focus on how to perform database operations through CouchDB’s HTTP API and how to work with it in PHP, laying the foundation for future, more complex posts.

The article is then broken up into different sections by operation, starting with the use of the CouchDB database via a console then via PHP:

• Creating a Database
• Talking to the HTTP API
• Creating New Documents
• Bulk Insert
• Retrieving Documents
• Updating Documents
• Working with PHP

Each section includes code snippets and (where relevant) screenshots of the results to help you ensure you're on the right track.