WAMP Hurdles

If you've read the last 2 of my book reviews, you're probably noticing a trend. I'm attempting to expand my skill set horizontally, starting down the path of what I view as the skill set of a 'classical' web application developer. I've brushed up on the essentials; HTML and CSS. And followed that up with a poor introduction to JavaScript. Now, I'm on my way to the exciting and powerful capabilities of PHP and MySQL.

After some time of reading and coming up to speed on the basics of PHP development, I decided to take a head first dive (no, there's no Head First PHP book) into this and focus on finding tutorials that build (small) applications from start to finish. Unfortunately, just getting my environment set up has been.... predictable.

Yes, I'm on Windows. I know, I know. I could buy a cheap development box, use a VM can, etc. Honestly, I'd rather just tough it out for now and worry about porting to LAMP (that made me laugh) when that bridge comes.

So, my first hurdle...

I downloaded PHP 5.2.5 and MySQL 5.0.51b, arriving at my first roadblock. The instructions I was following simply asked me to uncomment the line "extension=php_mysqli.dll" from my php.ini file; easy enough. Unfortunately, I found error logs reporting that the dynamic library could not be loaded and the specified module could not be found.

Quickly I found some indications online that I needed to grab a new PHP/MySQL connector. Following the provided link to a page on the MySQL site took me to pretty much, the last thing I wanted to see. Yeah, it was asking me to check out source code, overwrite some files, and build it myself. No thanks.

15 minutes of dedicated investigation later, I found a connector (already built) that I could download and replace the dll that came with PHP to work with just a slightly older version of MySQL (5.0.19).

Voila!