help with a SQL queries

hey everyone i have a database with multiple tables. The script involved is a news/journal/content management system.

What happens is once someone submits an article it rights to the table called 'entry' and populates all the fields specified in that table including a few variables that i want to use which are entry_author_id.

in the other table which holds all the users there are a few fields that tie in with the entry_author_id. for instance the entry_author_id is called author_id in the table with the all the users information including their name(author_name).

what i wanted to do is do a query in both tables and i want to carry over the value that entry_author_id holds and match it with author_id so that say if you have:

3 as the value in entry_author_id, and in the table with the author_id 3 is connected to user John Smith i wanted to carry over the value of entry_author_id so that variable pulls up the corresponding name to that number.

any help will be appreciated.

I am guessing that you want to pull the authors name at the same time you pull the article? You could do something simple like:

SELECT entry.title, entry.article, authors.author_name FROM entry, article WHERE entry.entry_author_id = authors.author_id

I obviously don't know all your table names and field names, but something like that would work....

so i am able to assign variables within a query? so i can do something like this:

SELECT author_id, author_name FROM table_a, table_b WHERE author_id = author_name

what i really wanted to do though is, in table_a once an entry is put it its given a history along with the author_id, in table_b it has all the users info including the author_id number that is assigned to a name.

so if i make author_id = author_name in the query will that pull up correctly?