SELECT
A.name AS name_A,
B.name AS name_B
FROM A, B WHERE A.id = B.id

and to access it just use $row['name_A'] ... the variable name still
gave me the information I need

PS: why don't you use LEFT JOIN ??

Well, in my real query it's an inner join. This was just a rather
meaningless example. If you're asking why I use the comma notation, I
just find it a bit more readable than "JOIN... JOIN... JOIN" when
several tables are involved.

> I have the following tables:
>
> a
> id, name,....
>
> b
> id,description,....
>
> ab
> id,aid,bid,grade
>
> I want to list the b's of a with name="fizz" for example.
>
> The one way to do it is :
> SELECT id FROM a WHERE name="fizz" and grab the id. then SELECT *
> FROM ab WHERE aid=id;
>
> the other is
> SELECT * FROM a,ab WHERE a.name="fizz" AND
> a.id=ab.aid

IME, I find queries that actually use JOIN to be quite a bit quicker. In
your case, you should try something similar to the following:

SELECT a.name, b.description, ab.grade
FROM a
INNER  JOIN b
INNER  JOIN ab ON ab.aid = a.id
ON b.id = ab.bid
WHERE a.name =  'fizz'

>create new table from old table
>old table has place names, say a to z.
> new table has to list all posssible connections, ie, a-b ,a-c , b -a .
> can anyone point me in the right direction for how to do this?
> tia.
INSERT INTO links
     (SELECT from.name, from.lat, from.lon, to.name, to.lat, to.lon
        FROM orig_table from
        JOIN orig_table to ON from.name<>to.name)