Installing and Testing Wampserver

Wampserver will give you a server on your own PC (Windows users), where you can test your scripts. If you haven't yet dowloaded the Wampserver software, you can download it from here
After installing the software an icon will appear in the bottom right

Right click  on the icon to see the menu above.
From here, you can stop the server, exit it, view help files, and see the configuration pages.
Click on localhost, and there you will see this page : (Localhost just refers to the server running on your own computer. Another way to refer to your server is by using the IP address 127.0.0.1.)

Click the link under Tools that says phpinfo(). If all went well, you should be looking at the following page (The one below is a different php version, but don't worry about this - as long as you see something): 

Saving your PHP files

Whenever you create a new PHP page, you need to save it in your WWW directory. You can see where this is by clicking its item on the menu:

When you click on www directory, you should see an explorer window appear. This one is from Windows Vista: (You'll probably have only two files, index and testmysql.)

This www folder for Wampserver is usally at this location on your hard drive:

c:/wamp/www/

Bear this in mind when you click File > Save As to save your PHP scripts.

Launching your PHP scripts

Suppose you have created a php script called test1.php. To launch this script, you need to add the script name after localhost in your browser. So instead of this:

http://localhost/index.php

You would type this:

http://localhost/test1.php

Don't type the name of the wamp folder, This would be wrong, for example:

c:/wamp/www/test1.php

What is PHP?

PHP is probably the most popular scripting language on the web. It is used to enhance web pages. With PHP, you can do things like create username and password login pages, check details from a form, create forums, picture galleries, surveys, and a whole lot more. If you've come across a web page that ends in PHP, then the author has written some programming code to liven up the plain, old HTML.

Before you can write and test your PHP scripts, there's one thing you'll need - a server! Fortunately, you don't need to go out and buy one. In fact, you won't be spending any extra money. That's why PHP is so popular! But because PHP is a server-sided scripting language, you either have to get some web space with a hosting company that supports PHP, or make your computer pretend that it has a server installed. This is because PHP is not run on your PC - it's executed on the server. The results are then sent back to the client PC (your computer).