I finally was able to start working through the devzone zend PHP tutorial.  I was still using HTML-Kit, and I immediately ran into a problem – none of the examples would work as advertised.  I had been copying and pasting the code, but I went through and checked syntax, tried minor modifications, put in lines of straight text to troubleshoot how far the interpreter was getting, but I couldn’t figure it out.  As usual, I was doing my learning during a flight.  When I got to the hotel, I tried uploading the files to our webhost and brining them up in a browser – sure enough, it worked perfectly.  Now I knew that the problem was my laptop environment.

My next approach, because I’m a software junkie, was to download other PHP development environments.  I came across several freeware and demo packages, but nothing yielded the results I got back from posting the files online.

I then searched online for “PHP on a desktop”, but that mostly brought up links to how to design PHP desktop applications.  Then I searched something along the lines of “PHP installations on a desktop”, and I was immediately introduced to the world of WAMP.  WAMP is a Windows packaging of Apache server, MySQL database manager and PHP scripting (LAMP for Linux, MAMP for MAC, SAMP for Sun).  Searching for WAMP installation options brought me first to HostScripts.com.  That had lots of choices, but help on how to decide which choice was best was lacking.  My next step was to look for a site that also explained how to install a WAMP server correctly.  Thankfully, that brought me to the TeamTutorials site.  In addition to instructions, it had a link to the latest version of the WAMPServer 2.0 installation kit.  I set it up, started putting my HTML and PHP working files in the corresponding directories, and then opened the files locally in a browser.  The result was a display that mirrored what I got back when I posted the same files online.  WHEW!  I then started flying through the tutorial, and I’m looking forward to my working on it more.  I’m on Part 6 now, and by Part 8 the tutorial is already introducing database interactions.  My goal is in sight!