you just made the best choice of your life. totally.

just jump in.
O'reilly books are always good.
there a bagillion script and how-to sites out there...

a lot of very helpful people here...

-frz

and get a good text editor that will help you. Zend may have a lighter tool than zend studio for debugging php scripts, and that should come in handy. I am going to look into it when I am done with this post.

Another great cover-all is the Oreilly cookbook series, I have it and I use it quite a bit. Many of the examples leverage the pear library but the overall syntax suggestions are spot on.

It would also help to look at some of the core concrete5 code, and to look at some examples on php.net

also check out this site:
http://nettuts.com/tutorials/php/oop-in-php/...

There is definitely some decent info and video tutorials there.

Is there a small project for concrete 5 I could help out on for a learning experience? Or does anyone have a project I could work on while learning... I wouldn't want any income, just a learning experience.

I'm with ya....html, css, infrastructure, I even model solution architectures with MVC patterns via UML but don't do alot of raw coding. I can tell you that the C5 architecture is THE best CMS to begin with. I have reviewed many and this architecture has been well thought out and implemented. I started with the great video tutorials and documentation at CodeIgniterhttp://codeigniter.com/ and like Scott and Frz recommend spending time looking at the C5 core code and digging in.

The documentation here on this site is getting up to speed pretty fast and Andrew provides a great shopping cart tutorial and other goodies....time and patience! I've been using the Coda application on my Mac but actually prefer TexWrangler.