PHP Freaks

There are a number of reasons as to why you might want to set up a local LAMP stack, the major one being the convenience that it provides for testing the code that you're writing - It's much quicker to serve your code locally than it is to upload it to a server on the internet, then download it again within your browser after every small change you make. Your production server may also be running specific versions of each element of the LAMP stack, which you can install on your local environment, this way you can be certain that your code will work when you upload it.

Full Article here: http://www.flingbits.com/tutorial/view/setting-up-a-lamp-development-environment [http://www.flingbits.com/tutorial/view/setting-up-a-lamp-development-environment]