Hello,
KEVIN YANK in his book indicated that installing individual packages is a dirty and quick solution. Why? What is the problem of installing all-in-one packages such as WAMP and XAMPP?
What about you? do you install them individually or …?
I use XAMPP - downloaded, up and running in about 5min also does everything I want.
I tried installing individualy the first time I wanted a local webserver and gave up after a couple of hours.
If your website is on shared hosting you are not going to be able to change anything anyway; so if you setup something special on your localhost the chances are the host will not install it anyway.
I don’t think installing the individual packages is quick or dirty at all.
It’ll take more time, but you’ll have a much better understanding about how to configure and setup MySQL/ Apache/ PHP afterwards.
I install the individual packages, I feel you lose control (or at least the awareness) of the server’s ecosystem with general AIO installers. For instance, would you know where to enable a module or extension? How would replace your finely tuned PHP environment to now use an alternate web-server such as nginx.
Sure they have their place, but not on my box.
Go with xampp. It installs the individual packages, just without the heartburn of getting them configured properly to work together in windows.
Seems like this is the crux of the argument. If you want to run your own server such as a VPS, then yes, you probably need to know how to do those things. If you are using shared hosting where very little of the actual site config of Apache, MySQL or PHP is accessible to the user and you just need a development server to be able to setup/connect to a database, process php, and display web pages… all the details of setting up and administering an Apache or MySQL server isn’t going to benefit you greatly. Still falls under ‘good to know’, sure. But not as essential.
I use WAMP 2 and it has been a breaze. Editing the configuration files as well as enabling / disabling modes / exts are as easy as a single click. I don’t see much advantage of installing them one by one over install them with a AIO package.
The truth is, I don’t know how to install individual packages. 
Yep, it takes me a few hours to get everything set up and configured this way.
XAMPP–5 minutes. The only think I’ve noticed that is different between an actual host is that cURL is disabled by default.