After discovering PHP and doing some online tutorials then reading the PHP 4 book (great book and found this forum, too), I decided I needed a local development environment, including a local web server, to test on. I tried to install IIS, WAMP, EasyPHP and had various problems with each of them. I then tried installing Apache with PHP and MySQL indvidually but couldn't make them work together either. I uninstalled everything and verified it was all gone then reinstalled WAMP5. Now, when I try to run anything with Firefox, it opens one window after another without stopping until I stop Firefox. Of course, nothing displays to give me a clue what's wrong.

Can anyone point me to a good tutorial or how-to on setting up a development environment on a local machine? Although this subject is covered, briefly, in the PHP 4 book, I've not been able to make anything work. Fooling with FTP and chewing up hosted server space and bandwidth are inhibiting my learning curve.

TIA