One of the toughest parts of developing a dynamic or database-driven website is testing. You might do all your design work on your local computer, and then you have to upload it to a testing server or even the live server in order to make sure that your data calls work correctly and the site functions as you intend it to. This can add a lot of time onto your development schedule. One way to fix this is to create a sandbox on your local machine that mirrors the set up on your Web server. If you're building a Web site on PHP with MySQL on an Apache Web server, you can set this up on your Windows machine without a lot of trouble using an installer package such as AppServ.
Set up a testing server on your Windows hard drive
By Jennifer Kyrnin, About.com GuideJanuary 8, 2008
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I’ve been using XAMPP for quite a while. It can be found on apachefriends.org. I’ve tried many other bundled packages, but this one is my favorite by far.
A book was recommended to me and I was able to set up the Apache web server, PHP, and MySQL by following the step by step instructions in it several weeks ago. (I am an experienced computer user but had no experience in any of these before. I had attempted to set these up a couple of times without success).
The book is “The Essential Guide To Dreamweaver CS3, Ajax, and PHP.” ISBN-13: 978-1-59059-859-7
I can’t speak for the rest of the book, but th installation of these packages was explained very well.
Actually, the exact title is, “The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP”.
Will you take us through the basics of setting up the needed fields and forms to make the data base usable?
Gary: You asked Will you take us through the basics of setting up the needed fields and forms to make the data base usable?
Answer: not in this article, but in a future one. However, my site is not focused on creating databases or using scripting languages like PHP. There are a couple of other sites on About.com that focus on that, and most of the time I’ll just be pointing to them:
PHP and MySQL @ About.com
Databases @ About.com
Good luck!