If you want to learn the language, w3school is your bet. If you want a book, I suggest PHP and MySQL Web Development Forth Edition.
If you just want a server up and running, I suggest MAMP. It's a very good development environment and has Apache, PHP & MySQL (The database you're talking about).
If you just want software to develop PHP on, I suggest CODA but any text editor will do. Text Wrangler is a very good free alternative. CODA has FTP (Transit), so it's a no-brainer for me.
Good luck