Newbie working with Dreamweaver tutorial database - trigger error?

[Joan]

Hopefully someone will be familiar with the book I am working through... the training from the source manual Dreamweaver MX 2004 with asp, coldfusion, and php by Jeffrey Bardzell. I am concentrating on the PHP version of the tutorial.

I am currently in Lesson 8, on connecting to the newland_tours database. Initially I got stuck two weeks ago having MySQL connection problems with a password, which has FINALLY been resolved.... or so I think.

However, I am still stuck because now the database is just not there. The conn_newland.php is empty except for the following in code:

<?php
# FileName="Connection_php_mysql.htm"
# Type="MYSQL"
# HTTP="true"
$hostname_conn_newland = "localhost";
$database_conn_newland = "newland_tours";
$username_conn_newland = "root";
$password_conn_newland = "xxxxx";
$conn_newland = mysql_pconnect($hostname_conn_newland, $username_conn_newland, $password_conn_newland) or trigger_error(mysql_error(),E_USER_ERROR);
?>

Is this my problem? trigger_error(mysql_error(),E_USER_ERROR);
If so, I have no clue what it means.

Is there anyone out there who can help me get past this problem?

Thanks.
Joan