Why would you make your own? There are hundreds of open source PHP-MySQL scripts out there to base your site on, and since you are new to this why not learn from the pre-existing packages?

You will learn plenty by poking around under the hood of Wordpress, or Drupal, or any of the others. Just Google "open source CMS" and you will get 10,000,000 results.

Well you have a point, thank you. The reason I would want to make my own isn't because I want to have one. But because I want to learn how to make one. And, granted, in the future, I'd love to actually know how to make one. Your suggestion is good but it undermines the reason of my wanting to learn how. In the end if I keep 'poking' through Wordpress or Drupal I'd have the tendency to 'copy-paste' their work which I would not rather do.

Besides, I'm already having trouble recognizing if I have installed PHP and Apache at the moment, learning how to do the rest comes after this little stone in my path. I'd appreciate it if you could help me with the question before. Is there a way to install all of these without having a domain name and server name which I would later might get. My reason for installing these is for learning purposes and not simply because I want to have a website.

The downloads were probably a bad idea. I think you would have been better off going to the bookstore first. Lots of the tools are on your computer already. And there is lots of really good hosting for reasonable prices out there. I think you can get what you need for about $60 in the way of hosting for a year.

If you get yourself a mac running leopard (which will run on used macs from 5 years ago.) you have php5 and apache pre installed. MySql is an extra download, but there are lots of good tools for installation.

Anyway, I like Larry Ulman's book on PHP-mySQL, I think he does a good job of getting you up to speed. Wrox Books has a very good book by five different authors called PHP5, mySQL and Web development is also a good resource.

I can't say enough nice things about CSS the missing manual.

Also Firefox has been a big help as a web browser, as there are plug in tools that you can add on that do lots of really helpful things, among other things validate the HTML code. HTML is pretty forgiving, but only within limits, and when things break, they break really badly, and the Firefox validation tools are really good for a beginner like us. Firebug is also really great. You can step through the CSS with it and see how the CSS code interacts with itself.

I love your take on things, and I think it's the right way.

I'd always recommend to start that way, looking at a finished product like wordpress will be an overdose for a beginner, and you need some experience with common concepts to profit from things like that.

to answer your question: yes, you don't need a domain to work with php and apache.

just install apache on your local machine and add php (should be easy enough), or download xampp, which is preconfigures with apache, php, mysql and perl and should "just work".
fire up your browser and go to [127.0.0.1...] to access your local installation. find the htdocs (that's the directory where all the files live that apache can serve to your browser) and throw in a file that ends in .php, let's say test.php, that contains

<? phpinfo(); ?>

back to the browser, navigate to [127.0.0.1...] and you should see alot of information.
now you can start to work with php. if you feel save around html-forms and how to work with the data entered in a php-script, add mysql-functionality. just check back here when you're ready.

There are hundreds of open source PHP-MySQL scripts out there, many of which have significant flaws and limitations.

as janharders says, yes you can run it on your local machine. If you have a windows machine, search for WAMP (windows, apache, mysql, php) and you will find a package to install on your desktop.

Yes, thank you everyone for your thoughts, I'll try things on my end and come back if I have any problems.

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], Aedym!

be sure to look at the WebmasterWorld forums in your specific disciplines of interest (PHP, Apache, Databases, etc)

Books work best for me. Whenever I want to learn something new, I pick up an O'Reilly series book on whatever it is... I know the same information is scattered around the net for free, but books just work for me.

Besides, I'm already having trouble recognizing if I have installed PHP and Apache at the moment

Take a look at XAMPP - apache, php and MySQL preconfigured and ready to go!