Macs come Apache installed (2.x for Leopard, 1.x for Tiger) so it's really easy to get a web server up and running. But if you want to install things like PHP and MySQL, there's a bit more work involved. But it's a lot easier now. With MAMP (http://www.mamp.info/en/mamp.html) you can install both MySQL and PHP on your Mac in a single click. It also installs PHP with most of the more popular packages like GDLib, Zlib, Mcrypt, Curl, and SSL. MAMP also gives you some other convinces. You can run either PHP 4 or 5, . It also provides GUI control panels for starting/stopping your server, enabling the ZEND, and other, optimizers.