Hi,
I am designing a website for our college students to buy and sell
things on this site. It is supposed to be a non commercial website.

I want to write the code in php as my college website also uses php. I
am very new to php but am good at programming languages such as c, c+
+,pascal, etc. Also I know html.

I am learning php from the book "Programming PHP" by Rasmus Lerdorf
and Kevin Tatroe. Please tell whether this book is the best place to
start learning, although I have read 2 or 3 chapters and am able to
understand it well.
I also have another book called "Beginning PHP5, Apache, MuSQL Web
development". It is a WROX book. Please tell which one would be
better.

Also, I would like to know some kind of mechanism that would stop
students to type in abusive or irrelevent content on the website while
they enter the description of what they want to sell.

Thanks