[drathbun]

I see lots of complex answers, but not the answer to actually learning a bit about PHP. My favorite book is "PHP in Easy Steps" by McGrath, published by Barnes and Noble. Very inexpensive.

A good intro to the basics, which will allow you to make use of the online docs, which is the best documentation of a programming language I've ever seen.

After that, the other resources come in to play. For an editor, I use notepad++ on the pc and textwrangler on the mac. With apache, mysql, and php running locally, your development platform is free.