Author here. I have very, very similar childhood memories of PHP. It really was a magic thing to mess around with - I think a lot of people had this experience.

Author here. I have very, very similar childhood memories of PHP. It really was a magic thing to mess around with - I think a lot of people had this experience. I suspect back then a lot of people learnt webdev this way. Sadly I suspect it's less common now. Back then the "LAMP" stack was common enough that there were turnkey packages for Windows that setup "LAMP" for you. Was one called Wampp, or something? I forget. At first I liked using a particular proprietary web server for Windows called 'Sambar Server' which made learning easy due to its PHP support and web GUI config editor. Later setting up Apache, PHP and MySQL on a new Windows install became a common habit for me, once I learnt how to do it. I would make PHP websites and host them locally, then show them to people by giving them the IP (and this was over dialup!)