I'm currently reading Larry Ullman's "PHP for the world wide web". It's a little bit old (2001) but it's all they had at the library. You can find it the latest edition here. It seems to cover all of the bases and I really like the Visual QuickStart Guides way of explanation.
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I think it depends on what your programming background is. If you've studied java or c++ or something similar, then you probably don't need anything more than the references @ php.net.
Thanks, I am kind of hessitant to keeping myself in front of an LCD but I guess it is free. The only coding experience that I have is some C and turbo pascal in high school, and some Java in college. I like coding HTML.XHTML and CSS if that helps.