First connection?

Hi, Fifteen years ago I did lots of Informix SQL on Unix -- including transaction processing -- BUT I find there isn't a lot of immediate help from that experience -- I tried using some webmonkey examples as "basic training" for php with MySQL and got nowhere. I'm on Red Hat with Apache 1.3.9, PHP 4.02 and MySQL 3.22.32 Is there a good place to find typical PHP and MySQL code examples for that configuration? My pages are "virtual" hosted and I have access to phpMyAdmin 2.0.5 which is a menu access by my ISP. My php.ini is at /usr/local/lib I've built a very small database of five fields in database "eprofitsys" in table "employees" and would like to connect to it within a .php file. So, obviously, I am at ground zero. Anyone want to lift me up. Lonnie