If you are interested in developing websites and applications using PHP, either for yourself or for clients, it’s a good idea to have a sandbox on your local machine to speed up the development process.  Trying to test and work out bugs when you have to upload your changes through FTP every time is hugely time consuming and frustrating.

Creating a sandbox on your local machine is the solution. WAMP or LAMP (depending on your OS).

This will consist of:

• Your OS (Linux or Windows)
• Apachie
• PHP
• MySQL

I can personally recommend a bundle called AppServ .  This is an open source bundle that takes much of the hastle out of the installation process, has all of the components bundled together in one easy location, and generally just makes life easier all around.

All you need to do is download the AppServ installation files, run them, put in localhost for the server and set up a password for MySQL and your on your way!

Here is an article describing the process in detail, but honestly it’s so easy you won’t even need to look at it.