Can somone point me in a direction

Hello,

I am in an office where I do the Flash animations, most of the web programming, and some very basic databse stuff. I want to learn a lot more about databases, I am just not sure where to start. Among other things I would like to learn how to make a connections to a database from a web page, run processes on the data(where does that even happen), and use the data in menus or tables.

Anyway, where should I start? Should I take some courses? If so, where? I know this is a vague question but if someone could give me some advice, it would help.

You can find all kind of connection strings here: http://www.connectionstrings.com/

Not sure what that means.

You can start with SQL Course forum in Databbase Journal.