Book Advice

[bigt]

I currently know nothing about xml, web services and soap and I am
also fairly new to PHP. I am, however, going to be diving into a
project based heavily on web services. Basically, the remote
system/database is constantly updated. I am only concerned with a
subset of the data contained in the database and this new web services
system is supposed to allow me to quickly and easy query out this
information via web services.

I guess SOAP fits in here somewhere (maybe the querying process?).
Once I retrieve the new/updated data I need to refresh my local MySQL
database with the data.

So my question is this: which texts are going to be the best starting
ground for me to get rolling with programming for this project. I've
read a couple of good things about PHP4 XML and XML Processing with
PERL, Python and PHP.

Again, since I am essentially starting from zero XML knowledge, I am
going to need to pretty good real work examples.

Also, does anyone think that PHP is not the right language for this
type of project - maybe PERL would be better suited, with PHP being
used for displaying the database results?