In this new post to the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc shares a chapter from the recently released Jump Start PHP Environments from SitePoint publishing. You can order a copy of your own here.

This chapter will focus on the application environment. We’ll also discuss *AMP bundles such as XAMPP and why they’re a poor choice; production /development parity; and performance and debugging.

The remainder of the post is broken up into these main sections and also discusses topics like:

• the differences between development, staging and production
• the "machine pollution" that comes with the *AMP bundles
• optimization tips about databases, front-end tools and caching

If this sample chapter was useful to you, be sure to check out and order the full book from the O'Reilly store.