>For the PHP part, I just took a quick trip to the local Barnes and Nobel, got a cup of coffee from the Starbucks there, and spent about 2 hours skimming a few PHP books before deciding on one to buy. Within 24 hours I had the first screens up and running, although the design of my code is a bit spaghetti-ish.

I've done exactly the same thing. One good book on PHP / MySQL and off I went. I missed the IDE / Intellisense etc. I can tell you !