Learning/Installing/Downloading PHP

[firewolf]

I was on a tutorial website and it said that I need to install a PHP-engine and some sort of Apache web server?? So then I went to PHP.Net and couldn't figure out what I was supposed to download. Binaries? Patches (I know what patches are). Source Codes? I'm very new to PHP and only know basic stuff like Form Mailers. But the problem is that I found out I couldn't see if it worked unless I upload the files to a server. However, I think I found out that you can just test it without uploading it, or something to that effect? How can I set this up so if I try this tutorials or whatever that I can make sure it works without uploading to my websites? What do I need to know in terms of what to download and how to install and what to do next to test out my PHP coding?

Any help would be much appreciated,
FireWolf

[qball]

you need:

web server, IIS, Apache, PWS....
you then install PHP as an 'App server' on given web server.

Thus when you have browser request a php page, the web server passes request to PHP to process back to web server and back to requesting browser.

It is that simple, and and as hard as you want to make.