Hi Andrew,
You indeed need a join.
I presume you have to tables, one named items and one name city.
I don't exactly know what those two tables are, but I guess you have items which are located in a city. The detailed information about the items is in the items table, and the detailed information of the city is placed in the city table. If my assumption is incorrect, please tell me, because it could be that the rest of my story is incorrect then.
When I make a join query, this is what I do:
First of all, make a list of all the fields from all the tables you need. For example if you would need ItemName and ItemDescription from the items table and CityName from the city table, make a list like this:
items.ItemName, items.ItemDescription, city.CityName
If you put the word SELECT in front of it you've got half the query
Then make the From statement. The primary data is coming from the items table, so extend the query with: From items
You also want information from the city table, so you have to join the items table with the city table. So extend your query with: left join city
Now the query needs to know on what field the two tables can be joined.
If you have a field CityId in you items table and a field ID in the City table(it's the primary key field, you can give it another name, but I commonly use ID for my primary key fields). So extend your query with:
on items.CityId = city.ID
know you can add the where and order by statements. But do not forget to use table.fieldname because you are using multiple tables, which could have some fields with the same name. So WHERE category = '$Category' would become WHERE items.category = '$Category'
This is the simple join query I build in this example:
SELECT items.ItemName, items.ItemDescription, city.CityName from items left join city on items.CityId = city.ID
Hope this gives you an idea.
You can find a lot more information about queries at
http://www.mysql.com. Just use the search function at the top right of their site.
Also if you have MS Access, you can use the query builder to make queries. They do not always work right away in MySQL but it get's close most of the time.
Good luck
Greetz Jolly.