Without further ado, we are going to head off to the osCommerce site and grab a copy for ourselves at http://www.oscommerce.com/solutions/downloads. At the time of writing, the current milestone is 2.2 and this is the version you should use unless the next milestone has come out in the interim. Which version you use won’t make a huge difference with respect to the material in this book.

Choose whether you would like to download osCommerce from Europe or the States by clicking on the relevant link, and save the download to your My Documents folder (or wherever you find most suitable). Notice that the download itself is only about 1.4 MB, so it's unlikely that you will have time to go and have that all-important cup of coffee while you wait—unless you are on a particularly slow dial-up connection.

Once the file has downloaded, extract it to the same folder. You will find that everything is contained within a directory called something like oscommerce-2.2ms2 depending on which version you are using. If you open up this main directory, you will see that it contains a folder called catalog. Zip up this folder, and call the new file catalog.zip. Once that is done you are ready to transfer the catalog folder over to the host.