PHP software

I picked up a book on PHP that seems pretty good as a learning book and reference material.

Problem is, they don't state the software you need to test your code!!

I've got Tomcat on my system as a webserver, but what else do I need to be able to run and test my PHP code?

Note: The book goes into depth into XML technologies: SAX, DOM, XPath, and XSLT. Software to run these scripts would be nice too.

(a web page tutorial for intro to PHP and setting up your system to use it would be great, first and foremost)

it's much more maintainable than Perl and Java

Elaborate.

And most serious stuff is written in C.

You're being liberal with the meaning of "most". All the world is not OSS.