Recommendation: Buy this book (for a gentle introduction to PHP for the non-programmer).
The tag line for this book is “A Pain-Free Introduction to Building Interactive Web Sites”, and it’s accurate. This is one of the best books that I’ve seen for non-programmers interested in learning programming concepts. All of the material is written from a non-programmer’s perspective, and the material is selected to allow you to quickly learn enough PHP to accomplish common tasks, while actually understanding the underlying code.
The chapters are structured so that you can read them in order, or, after devouring the first few, you can pick and choose what to study (making it moderately useful as a simple reference, as well).
If you are a programmer, this is not the best introduction to PHP; the amount of prose on basic concepts can grow tedious, and the depth of the information is insufficient to sate a very technical appetite.
Overall, this book combined with php.net will get you well on your way to writing small applications.
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[...] If you do not have much programming experience, I would recommend that you pick up Learning PHP 5, by David Sklar (amazon). Once you’ve explorer the first few chapters, I recommend that you pick up a copy of the PHP Cookbook (amazon). It presents reasonable solutions and explanations for common PHP problems. [...]