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)

http://tnx.nl/php
    * Re^2: Is Perl a good career move? by Juerd, 2005
          o Still no namespaces
          o No closures, not even anonymous functions
          o No good HTML parser
          o No easy MIME builder
          o No good WWW library
          o No CPAN
          o No arrays
          o Less useful logical operators
    * Yaywoo! by Dave Brown, 2004
          o No way to avoid the (unsafe) shell with system()
          o XY-problem
          o Huge proliferation of different functions to do more-or-less the same thing with minor variations
          o Second parameter and return value make no sense
          o Bad spelling in function names
    * Why PHP sucks by Edwin Martin, 2004
          o Bad recursion support
          o PHP is not thread safe
          o PHP is crippled for commercial reasons
          o No namespaces
          o Non-standard date format characters
          o Confusing licenses
          o Inconsequent function naming convention
          o Magic quotes hell
    * Perl vs. PHP - octo's subjektiver Vergleich by Florian Forster, 2003 (German)
          o Perl is faster than PHP
          o Perl is more versatile than PHP
          o Perl has better documentation than PHP
          o PHP lacks support for modules
          o PHP's here-docs are useless for Windows users
          o PHP lacks a consistent database API
          o PHP dangerously caches database query results
          o For graphics, PHP is practically limited to GD
    * I hate PHP by Keith Devens, 2003
          o Idiotic call-time pass-by-reference deprecation
    * Experiences of Using PHP in Large Websites by Aaron Crane, 2002
          o PHP promotes interweaving presentation with business logic
          o Not having namespaces causes problems
          o Global configuration with php.ini
          o Oversimplification leads to excessive complexity
    * PHP Annoyances by Neil de Carteret, 2002
          o No real references or pointers
          o No idea of namespace
          o No componentization
          o Wants to be Perl, but doesn't want to be Perl
          o No standard DB interface
          o All PHP community sites are for non-programmers
          o No chained method calls (Not true anymore --tnx.nl)
          o No globals except by importation
          o Both register_globals and $_REQUEST bite
          o Arrays are hashes
          o PEAR just ain't CPAN
          o Arrays cannot be interpolated into strings
          o No "use strict" like checking of variable names
    * PHP: A love and hate relationship by Ivan Ristic, 2002
          o The community gets on my nerves
          o Knowledgeable people are in a serious minority
          o Zend publishes articles suggesting insecure practice
    * My list of PHP shortcomings by Nathan Torkington, 2001
          o No namespaces
          o All functions are global
          o No real references
          o No real data structures (Not true anymore --tnx.nl)
          o No anonymous functions