If you have been around the web for a little while, you’ve probably heard of PHP or PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. This is one of the most popular web programming languages right now and for good reason. It’s flexible, powerful, relatively easy to learn, and, best of all free.

The problem I had with beginning to program in PHP,though, was that I had no place to test it before uploading to a web server. So, I went to the search engines and found a solution: MAMP. This is a development environment consisting of Macintosh – Apache – MySQL – PHP.

I’m doing my development on my trusty little iBook, so I had to find something that would work with Macintosh. MAMP is perfect. After a rather large download, MAMP is easy to install. Simply unzip the file, mount the disk image (.dmg) file by double-clicking, and then drag and drop the MAMP folder from the disk image to your Applications folder.

Using MAMP is as easy as double-clicking the application file to turn on the servers. After that, all you have to do is copy your web files into the ‘htdocs’ folder inside the MAMP application folder and navigate to ‘localhost:8888’ in your browser.

You may know that OS X already comes with versions of Apache and PHP installed. So, why use MAMP? Because, MAMP puts it all together in one easy install. You don’t have to mess around with configuration files or downloading and installing MySQL. The installation doesn’t touch any of the important files already on your Mac and if you ever want to uninstall it, just drag the MAMP folder to the trash can. And one more great reason to use MAMP? It’s freeware.