Connecting to mySQL database

First off, an introduction - my name is Dillon, and I am a newbie to
iPhone Application Development. I have been head deep in studying
reference materials and video tutorials, and in the past few months, I
feel I have made tremendous progress.
However, after a few weeks of being stuck on an issue, I figured it
was time to ask the experts.
The goal in my learning is to communicate from the app to my database
(php/mysql). The ultimate goal is to run a search, and have the
results sent back to the app from the database.
As a brief to anyone with the time to help, I am using two books for
direction and code references: iPhone SDK 3 Progg. by Maher Ali &
iPhone SDK3: Visual Quickstart Guide by Duncan Campbell. I believe
the code to be right, but I am unsure of how to go about testing it's
communication back and forth.
Before I post all this code, maybe a more simple approach can help.
Is there any sort of testing or debugging advice anyone has for basic
app2db connectivity? Please let me know if I need to post the code
that I am using.
Thanks in advance,
D. Hott