UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hey, you said this forum was for Dummies, so don't blame me for the following!

My whole "web building" life, I've had my sites hosted in one for or another. Lately, I've gotten into PHP and MySQL and, of course, those are also hosted for me. But lately, I've been thinking of using PHP and MySQL on my personal computer, 'cause sometimes connecting to the internet is problematic and sometimes I wouldn't mind using both to do personal things unrelated to web sites.

That said, I obviously have no idea how to go about this. (You knew there'd be a catch.)

So I've been doing research into it today, and PHP seems to want Apache and Apache seems to want Unix. (They also say I can use Windows but that no one supports it and it's risky, which doesn't sound good to me.)

So my questions:

1) Does it sound like I'm on the right track or have I gotten lost? Is Unix indeed the answer I'm looking for?

2) What the heck is Unix, exactly? I don't quite get the concept.

3) Are there any really good tutorials recommended for those in my predicament (i.e., knowing nothing - no assumption of knowlege!)

From the USAIL site- First Timers What is UNIX?
"Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don't think that this is a coincidence."

(Anonymous quote from The UNIX-HATERS Handbook.)

A Brief History...Read More
Many proprietary operating systems have a simplified view of application behavior. The typical application reads some data from disk, tape or a terminal and does some processing. Output is produced onto disk, tape, tape, terminal, or printer. The operating systems generally provide easy to use well-implemented facilities to support these types of facilities.

As applications become more sophisticated they need new features such as network access, multi-tasking, and interprocess communications. In traditional operating systems, these features are often hard to use, not well documented, and only callable from assembly language. When a program makes use of these features, the program may be much more complex and much more difficult to maintain.

In UNIX because the C language was written to be used to implement an operating system rather than a traditional "input-processing-output" application, use of these sophisticated features is quite easily done from the C language without writing any assembly language.

In addition, the documentation for these sophisticated features is in the same format and location as the documentation for the normal application calls.

When UNIX was distributed, users could write applications in C and easily make use of all of the operating system facilities. This allowed application developers to quickly develop much more sophisticated applications using these facilities.

The pattern of development in UNIX when adding new features such as networking is to provide an application program interface from the C language to access the new features.

In general UNIX system developers and application developers program in the same language using the same application programming interface. In typical proprietary operating systems, the operating systems programmers are programming in assembly language and have access to a many capabilities which are not available to the application developer.

As UNIX was ported onto more and more different types of computer hardware the UNIX networking allowed many different types of systems to share and mutually use data. Networks consisting of many different systems could be used as a large distributed system.

When SUN Microsystems added NFS (Network File System), this ability to share and mutually use data was significantly enhanced.

There are three primary causes for UNIX's popularity (and none is user interface):

Only a very small amount of code in UNIX is written in assembly language. This makes it relatively easy for a computer vendor to get UNIX running on their system. UNIX is nearly the unanimous choice of operating system for computer companies started since 1985. The user benefit which results from this is that UNIX runs on a wide variety of computer systems. Many traditional vendors have made UNIX available on their systems in addition to their proprietary operating systems.
The application program interface allows many different types of applications to be easily implemented under UNIX without writing assembly language. These applications are relatively portable across multiple vendor hardware platforms. Third party software vendors can save costs by supporting a single UNIX version of their software rather than four completely different vendor specific versions requiring four times the maintenance.
Vendor-independent networking allows users to easily network multiple systems from many different vendors.
These features of UNIX have contributed to its rise in popularity since the mid 1980's



UNIX is just COOL!
Some Good Sites

UNIX-Systems Site

Join UNIX.com (its free)

Unix Guru Universe

USAIL

The Apache+PHP+MySQL combination does run on Windows unless you have unusual demands. There is a sourceforge.net project "PHP Triad" (http://sourceforge.net/projects/phptriad) that installs all of these in a single go. I haven't used it before, but heard it frequently referenced in some other Web development forums. A choice if you want to do Web development while do not want to leave Windows.