If you want to play around with PHP LAMP or Ruby on Rails programming, it can be very challenging to get all the pieces required for the evironment installed and working together. So instead of digging into the code, you end up troubleshooting MySQL or PHPMyAdmin.

Thankfully some hard working developers out there have created some one click installers that automatically install all the pieces of a development environment. All the pieces get installed, work together and don't mess up your system.

LAMP

The the LAMP based installer I found was XAMPP. This package installs PHP, MySQL, Apache, Apache, SQLite, PHPMyAdmin, etc... Everything you need to get right to hacking code. They have installers for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris.

Ruby on Rails

For Windows you can install Instant Rails. You get Ruby, Rails, Apache, MySQL and PHPMyadmin in this package.

For Mac OS X you can download locomotive. This package GREATLY simplifies Rails development on OSX. Ruby, Rails, MySQL, SQLite are all included without messing with the rest of your OS X setup.