A simple question.
I have a mac. I have just put my site on lunarpages and i want to learn a bit about dynamic pages. my website is called aspirecreate.com. It is just a personal site.
I bought a book about it. "dreamweaver advanced"
The book is now talking about downloading php and sql software. But it does'nt say if this is nesscesary for both a local sites and a remote sites. Since my site is remote do I need to down this software and does anyknow any goodsite regarded this information?

thanks
jason

You will need to download it and set it up if you want to test your PHP pages on your machine without uploading them to the server everytime.

It certainly is possible to code it, publish it, and test it, but for obvious reasons most people just install it locally to test on their own machine.

Here is an excellent article on installing the server and giving you a bunch of info.

If you dont own your server and it doesnt have PHP and SQL installed on it, probably nothing you can do. You could bug the host though

If you own the server yourself then you have to download PHP and SQL and install it on your server in order for your PHP pages to work

If your server DOES already have PHP and SQL on it, there is no need to download them. Unless you want to test out your pages on your machine without having to upload them to your website. In which case you do download them and install them locally.

thankyou for that advice.
My shared hosting servers states that it has unlimited MySQL Databases and PHP support. I guess that means that they are on the server anyway.
I read that to install these on a mac I have to to use terminal, which I don't know much about. so i would rather no install on my mac and just test on line with the server.
I have set up a testing server through dreamweaver which only takes a few seconds to connect to the server. Can I use this to test php and MySQL pages?

Yes, if the test server is running off of your site server, and not your own machine.