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@gec2002 wrote:

If your doing your own site its well worthwhile having a bit of an idea of WAMP or LAMP.  You can download WampServer from SourceForge and set it up on your own PC and just use localhost, that way you can learn about Apache, PHP and MySQL without worrying too much about the security issue.  You can build a site locally, tweek it and then move it to a server if you want.

 

Before getting into eBay APIs you should have some knowledge of SOAP and XML

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I agree with everything said above and it's very true that working with localhost is the only way to get your toes wet.

Having said that though, if and when you decide to move a site to a hosting provider it will usually be in the 64 bit Linux world.

I'm using CentOS which is a branch of Red Hat and used by a good many hosting companies.

The closer your dev environment is to your production environment, the more trouble free your transition should be.

Some research on PHP versions would not go astray as they are up to Ver 7 but not everyone supports it yet.