I have a column called price in table a. and a column called price in table b - I am trying to figure how to make the column in table b be populated by the column in table a.

EXAMPLE

TABLE A TABLE B

price price
=== ===
50 (here i want the 50 from table a to appear automatically)

update b
set b.price=a.price
from srcTable as a
  inner join trgTable as b
    on a.id=b.id

This will do what you want to, but directly in SQL. No need of PHP for that.
Of course, you'll need to adapt the query to your schema structure.