I want to test some PHP on my local machine running Windows XP Professional. I'm familiar with coding PHP for upload, but not with running a web server.
What is the easiest way to set up a test environment? Step-by-step instructions would be great if you can give them.
(I see WAMP recommended in this thread - thoughts?)
Update - a year later
A little self-promotion: after using XAMPP for a long time, I began to want things it didn't include. (Support for PDO was a big one - every time I tried to enable pdo and mysqli simultaneously, something crashed.) I eventually worked through the process of installing Apache, PHP, MySQL, and PHPMyAdmin individually, and documented the process with screen shots on my blog.
Some of the configuration that I was able to do this way could have been done in XAMPP, but it was only because I had to set things up myself that I discovered new things (like being able to serve files out of c:\whatever instead of c:\program files\apache\htdocs).
On the whole, I'm happier with having installed these items separately. But XAMPP was a good (and easy) package to start with, and served me well while I used it.