Well having just read about all the cool new stuff availible in PHP5, and not really understanding too much incidently! I found this cool article on PHP6 and what to expect.

PHP 6.0 looks to be an exciting release. Nothing is absolutely fixed yet, but it looks like it will see the demise of three of my pet peeves: register_globals, magic_quotes_gpc and safe_mode. The first was just a big security hole, the second messed with the data and made changing environments potentially nightmarish, while the third was a misnomer that nobody really understood, and provided a false sense of security.

Also take a look at the Resty blog, it has a lot of interesting PHP news.

And to kick off the year at WhiteWallWeb, this is first on my Amazon wishlist, Ajax in Action which can also be bought here

Just incase you were wondering how MySQL stacked up against the rest, check this DB comparison out