Appendix A. Obtaining and Installing Software

This appendix describes how to obtain and install the software you'll need to run MySQL and the related third-party software described in this book, such as Perl DBI and CGI.pm support, PHP, and Apache. It also indicates how to obtain the files associated with the samp_db sample database used throughout the book.

The purpose of this chapter is to bring together installation instructions for all the packages in one place, not to replace the instructions that come with each package. In fact, I encourage you to read those instructions. This appendix provides general instructions that should suffice for most situations, but each software distribution also contains instructions that help you troubleshoot problems when a standard installation procedure fails. For example, the MySQL manual contains an extensive chapter dealing with installation procedures and includes solutions to many system-specific problems.