Helpful Information

Category: PHP

How to get going

I am a novie user of PHP but I am keen to learn more can you please tell me what I need to do once I have downloaded PHP for Windows.
I would like to create a site locally as I do not have acess to a web server is this possible???

Please can yo tell me how to get started.

SMTP??? what no do I type in???

I would suggest a good PHP/mySQL combo book for beginners.

I know I need to buy a book but it actually getting on and downloading and being abe to use the program I'm struggling with

To experiment/develop with PHP you can just set up your own PC to run your PHP stuff. Firepages my fellow mod developed an easy to install package containing apache, php engine, mySQL, phpMyAdmin, etc for developing and testing PHP scripts on your own machine. Just go to the site listed in his profile and download phpdev4 and if you have questions regarding it just ask them here.

In regards to books, many of them have instructions right at the beginning on setting up php/mySQL locally as well.

i think i would recomend phpdev4 to any newbies because setting up a server (dauting task to common user), configering PHP(sifting through config files gets you lost) and then having to set up mysql (now thats the hard one, i wouldnt want to do that again in a ifetime without having a good plan on how to do it because the first time took me about 3 hours to get it going! how badly can a program be documented...)

In case you need a link to all this discussion, here's one to several PHP installation kits for your PC: http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Software_and_Servers/Installation_Kits/