Working with phpMyAdmin, doing SQL queries

I added some tables into my movie database using phpmyadmin and it's much easier than raw code. The book suggests after this chapter that you use phpmyadmin, anyway, so that's good. BUT - they continue to give the SQL syntax as if everything was going to be hardcoded in the PHP script. What you put into phpmyadmin is different than what you put in the PHP script even if it's the same query, right? That's screwing me. Next up is working with some aesthetic elements to put tables around my data, and soon I'll dive into user-submitted form stuff. Console is showing my errors, which is helpful, but I still -- someday -- would like them to show up on the browser-generated page, like it does in the examples in my books. Flipping back to Console is a bit of a pain.