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)

I don't want to get embroiled in this impending PHP vs Perl holywar, but I'd like to question this:

Compared it to Perl and was about as fast, and the Zend Engine 2 is getting faster.

Everything I know about the two tells me that is false. Of course, my anecdotal evidence is cheap. This might be worth more: http//shootout.aliot/...

Perl is always faster, usually uses less memory, and takes significantly fewer lines to achieve the same. Now whether those lines are readable is another story...