W3Schools is also a good site: you can learn most Internet technolohies there, including PHP, HTML, CSS, SQL, XML and so on.
Worth a look. It takes you from the intelligence-insulting basic stuff and gets you on your way to understanding more complex principles and techniques.
Personally, I like PHP. But you can also learn ASP, Perl, or others. What does your server support? You'll need to learn one that is supported on the server you have access to?
Hardcopy, printed books usually tend to be very expensive.
I hate linking to advertisements normally, but here is one you might try:
PHP and MySQL for dummies (it's worth also knowing a database, and MySQL is as good as any).
I learned by going to
Google and seaching for such terms as 'PHP tutorial', 'MySQL tutorial', 'server-side scripting tutorial' ..... and browsing the search results to see good quality, free tutorials.