My reply to Richard Stecenko under the "idea Man" topic on the Chatter forum contains info that may be of interest to others who want to learn PHP and MySQL. Therefore, I'm reproducing the relevant parts of that reply here.
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With regard to your future development with MySQL and open source products, if a browser form interface would work for your application, I would recommend that your learn to use PHP for your web application development. PHP and MySQL are tied closely together to ease web application development. IMO, it's much easier to create a web application with PHP and MySQL than with ASP.Net.
There are frameworks such as Yii (yiiframework.com) that can give you a head start in building web applications with PHP and MySQL
A couple of years ago when I started learning PHP and MySQL, I used Robin Nixon's Learning PHP, MySQL and JavaScript to get started and found it very helpful. However, you may want to search for something newer at Amazon. There are tons of PHP, MySQL and JavaScript tutorials available on the internet for free, but a book like Nixon's ties together the basics of what you need to learn.
However, if a web application won't work for your application and you need a windows desktop app, there are frameworks for that emerging. Google something like "MySQL windows applications" to see what's out there. We're still evaluating what's available although we would like to confine our work to web applications if we can.
Working with VPME we take for granted all the unique features that VPME provides for windows GUI applications. The web application frameworks don't provide things like an active data dictionary, specialized form classes, etc.
In any event, to get started with PHP and MySQL go here http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html and download XAMPP for Windows and install it. XAMPP will install an Apace web server, a MySQL server, PHP and other goodies you'll need to learn PHP and MySQL. Also, download and install the Netbeans PHP IDE; you'll need Netbeans as you learn PHP.
I would also recommend that you download and learn Joomla!. You'll need the XAMPP installation in place before installing Joomla!. Joomla is based on PHP and MySQL and it's a great web development tool. I used it for the new ProMatrix web.
Finally, I would be delighted to discuss the various topics mentioned here with you further. Let's start using the little-used PHP and MySQL forum for those discussions.