If you want to get serious with PHP and MySQL, install Apache on your computer, and then install PHP, MySQL, and PHPmyAdmin. I'd suggest
XAMPP, since it's an all-in-one package.
Once you get going, you should be able to fire up your browser (Firefox of course!
) and type in
http://localhost/ or
http://localhost:8080/ into the address bar and see what the server on your computer is doing. Next, use PHPmyAdmin (through your web browser) to set up some test MySQL database tables.
Once these are created, you can write and execute PHP files on your own computer, and test all your database scripts on your computer instead of having to FTP every file to a remote server to test it.
It looks like Sam has the actual coding-end pretty much wrapped up for a simple demo, so I'll leave that to them.
