One of the first steps I took to learn about developing websites was to understand how it worked and I needed to be able to work in a close environment that is not on the internet already. From working on websites in the past, I knew about servers like Apache and script languages like PHP and databases like MySQL. I set out to mimic this environment on my laptop. There definitely is no right way, but I toggled around trying to install the Apache server on my laptop along with PHP5 and the MySQL database. It was tedious and it did not work together.
Separately, I could see each program installed and working as I am able to login to my database and insert queries and tables but when I created a PHP document, it could not fetch the data. The Apache server was working but I have no clue on what its purpose was for except that I now had a localhost set up and it detected PHP and MySQL. Stumbling around but still determined, I found several packages out on the web that had all three components working simultaneous and it all came in a single install package.
After playing around with the different packages, I decided to use Xamp as opposed to Wamp. There are a bunch more but these two come to mind. Set up for these are simple and right away you have a web developing friendly environment so you are able to serve pages to a browser directly. The main benefit of this is be able to install open source programs for testing. After all, it would be tedious to get a webhosting and upload it and install it and then find out it is not what you are looking for.
I had conquered my first obstacle on understanding web development and to save you some time, I recommend you to just go ahead and download one of these web developer environment packages so you can go right ahead and start playing around.
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