What just happened?

We just used Terminal to run a special command that configured Finder to show the hidden files and then ran another command to restart the Finder. It's not important for you to remember these commands or fully understand what they mean; you probably will never have to type this again. If you look around your computer you should see quite a few files that you haven't seen before. Here's a quick example of what my hard drive looks like now:

Now that all of the files on our machine are shown, let's talk about text editors, which will be the primary way you'll view and edit your development project.

Text editor

In order to write code, you will need a solid text editor. There are a lot of text editors out there, and you can use whichever one you prefer. All of the code in this book will work with any of them. I personally prefer TextMate because of its simplicity and ease-of-use.

You can download and install TextMate here: http://macromates.com/.

Apache

Apache is an open source web server and the engine that will run the PHP code that you'll write in this book. Luckily, Apache comes pre-installed on all installations of Mac OS X, so all we need to do is start it using Terminal.

That's all it takes to get Apache up and running on your computer. Apache won't let you turn it on if it's already running. Try typing that same statement again; your machine will alert you that it's already running:

Web browser

You probably use a web browser every day when surfing the Internet, but it will also double up as a powerful debugging tool for us. I will use Chrome as my web browser, but the up-to-date versions of Safari, Firefox, or Internet Explorer will work just fine as well. Let's use our web browser to check that Apache is accessible.