I Personaly use windows for development this is for the reason is it provides the most flixibility for a developer to find a comfertable to use editor,

This cource does not require to use windows, linux or mac are able to run tools i use for editing how ever installing a working php system maybe harder if your choosing to use one of these operating system please find a tutorial to install a MAMP (for Mac) or (LAMP) for linux 

So Were going to start with your setup and make sure you have php running to do this were going to test your php setup to do this all you need to do is create a simple index.php file within your apache root folder for windows users using XAMPP this will be "<install_location>\htdocs\"
if this file exsists you are safe to remove it

Once you have created the index.php file add the following code to your newly created index.php

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

if your running into a problem like your not seeing your page like below check there is not another index file with a different extension E.G .html

Having another problem feal free to ask and i will try to help i have run a AMP packege on every environment