I'm currently an ASP.NET developer in my day job, but I decided to spend some of my spare time learning PHP. Some of my motivations for doing this are that the PHP development stack is free and the hosting options are much cheaper. Since I'd love to someday run my own web development business this is appealing to me. There are also many popular websites that run on PHP, such as Facebook.
In order to get started with PHP, you will need a php web development stack. I chose to use the XAMPP stack after doing some research. The reason I chose to use XAMPP is because I will be developing in a windows 7 environment, but I may want to deploy to a LAMP host. XAMPP is an acronymn:
X: represents the server. It is x because XAMPP is platform independent.
A: stands for Apache, which is the web server. If you are coming from an ASP.net background, you can think of Apache as the IIS of the PHP world.
M: stands for MySql, which is an open source database commonly used by PHP web applications
P: stands for PHP.
P: stands for Perl.
To install XAMPP, you can download it from the apache friends website or you can follow the instructions from Murach's website.
I did run into some issues getting Apache to run after installing XAMP. This appears to be an issue specific to Windows 7. I will cover the resolution to that issue in my next post.
I highly recommend Murach's book PHP and MySQL as a guide to learning PHP:
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