Begining mySQL for every day work and linking in and out of MS Excel

(Skip to the bottom if you are ONLY interesting in the MySQL portion of the question)

There's a few basic questions that need to be answered before you can really decide where to start. These are, in order:
1) What platform will this eventually be deployed on (Windows IIS + MySQL, Linux+MySQL, etc). Your needs.
2) What type of data are you planning to make accessible (content that can be displayed inline on the web, files for download, media content, etc.)
3) What language it's going to be developed in (PHP,perl,python,ruby,ASP,.NET, etc)

#1 will let you know if you have to curtail some of your choices. Some technologies, many Microsoft related, will only work on their platform. Most of the open source technologies are platform agnostic.

After defining #2, you can actually determine whether you need to build something yourself (which it sounds like you are considering, based on your question), or use some off (that somehow seems less fitting when much of your choices are freely downloaded) the shelf components.

#3 is only needed if you aren't using an off the shelf component or you plan to modify it in some manner.

After that is decided, you can look into resources about the choices you have made. I would suggest a good book on learning MySQL, but don't know one from the other.

If you are building it yourself, I recommend PHP as a good beginner language that has plenty of support for running on both windows and Linux, with plenty of tutorials and documentation.

Now, for the ACTUAL QUESTION you asked, I would suggest w3schools as a good resource, http://www.w3schools...ql/default.asp. They generally have very useful information on most web related technologies I've referenced there. Go through their tutorial, look up other resources where something is unclear, and then buy an beginner or intermediate MySQL book for reference and to fill in the gaps. The two main things I think you need to come away with initially are data normalization, and table joining. With those well understood, everything else SQL related can be picked up as you encounter a need.