I have a website where we want to be able to read from a database and give the user a list of resources based on the criteria from a drop box (e.g. if you live in Alaska, you are given Alaska resources). I'm familiar enough with basic programming constructs, but not PHP itself. Is there a good, idiomatic tutorial for this anyone knows of; something more or less plug and play where the basics are commented nicely and I can change connection strings and build the actual database myself?
I'm going to recommend using PDO extension, there are alternatives, such as mysqli with plenty of examples. I would recommend looking at the PHP manual for PDO to get to grips with what it's doing. A quick google came up with DB wrapper class which should be good enough to get you going. (I've not used it but it looks simple enough).