When I learnt PHP I didn't really needed a book. What I put on my pipeline was like 'build a small blog cms'. I then figured out how to do it, applying also my previous C language knowledge and digging the manual for syntax and functions specs.

After having it working in a very "procedural" way I started to make it OOO compliant (it was PHP4) and then I refined it for some times.

I have a question, btw... How could it be that you are not a newbie to programming but PHP is your FIRST programming language?