OK I'm not sure how to get off the ground.

I have PHP and MySQL installed (I've installed apachefriends.org's XAMPP) and want to start using mysql. OK a few questions:

1) why is it, after setting the root password in phpmyadmin (which I'm told is the first thing you should do), all subsequent attempts to use mysql in phpmyadmin result in a 'can't connect' error?

2) the book I have talks about "mysqladmin" a lot, but I can't seem to download that from anywhere. Where do I get it and tie it in with my installation?

3) should I start learning mysql by setting it up/adding information through a command line interface, or directly through PHP? That's my end goal, to use the database to serve content for a site.

I realise this is a broad remit, but any help would be appreciated. To assist you: I'm an advanced php programmer, am testing on windows but eventually uploading to unix... anything else?

Thanks, Andy.

Andy,

I'd like to go the way of using PHP and mysql someday, but unfortunatley I can't get PHP and Apache to play nice in the compile on AIX, So if you can throw me any help. But back to mysql. If you are trying to connect remotely, you must set a paramter in the mysql database like so -

mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'username'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'some_pass' WITH GRANT OPTION;

This will grant full privileges to the user from any remote host (%) with a password of some_pass. If this is not set in your mysql database, then remote connections will not happen.