I am sorry to hear that :) I like the O'Reilly book "Programming PHP" by Rasmus Lerdorf and Kevin Tatroe. I think of it as analogous to the Camel book for PHP. Easy to read, has all the basics well explained. There is a chapter on databases, but not much on MySQL in particular. Once you know the basic language elements, however, that should be enough to start tweaking already written, working code.