Chapter 1. Setting Up the PHP Development Environment

Getting a working development environment put together can be intimidating, especially for the absolute beginner.

To follow along with the project in this book, you'll need to have access to a working installation of Apache, PHP, and MySQL, preferably on your local machine. It's always desirable to test locally, both for speed and security. Doing this both shelters your work-in-progress from the open Internet and decreases the amount of time spent uploading files to an FTP server and waiting for pages to reload.