Thanks everyone for your precious recommendation. The PHP.Net website provides tons of useful resources and I already bookmarked it (thanks to SambaNiko).
For the book, I ended up picking "PHP and MySQL Web Development" by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson from Amazon mainly based on the customers' review there.
http://www.amazon.com/PHP-MySQL-Web-...4181533&sr=1-1

I'll certainly visit this forum a lot once I have started on the upcoming php project. For the mean time, I will mark this thread as resolved.
And again, thanks everyone.

Stanav.