> PDO is awesome but requires deeper level of understanding (for a beginner), which may increase the frustration and may end up returning back to the mysql_query and co.

Yeah, that's basically why I wrote EasyDB. https://github.com/paragonie/easydb

    $rows = $db->run('SELECT * FROM comments WHERE blogpostid = ? ORDER BY created ASC', $_GET['blogpostid']);
    foreach ($rows as $row) {
        // etc
    }

Teach people to do things this way rather than concatenate strings, say goodbye to SQL injection vulnerabilities.