PHP Help for Newbie

Okay, I’m trying to learn PHP and am having some trouble. What I really want to focus on is using HTML forms with PHP to manage MySQL databases…simple, huh?

I am reading the book “PHP Essentials” an cannot get any of the code to work. For instance, I have a very simple MySQL database with a table that contains 9 fields of information about books. I am attempting to add records to the db via a form.

Here is part of the code I am using: