That looks like a good article you’ve linked to… but you’re right. The list is pretty overwhelming. I guess there are some advantages to having been hanging around the web dev world for over a decade. It rules out a lot of the fluff for you.

Absolutely unit tests are a luxury. The simplest test is: What do you want it to do? Does it do it? Brilliant. Now give it to a couple of users. Can they break it? Done! I’m done with faffing. Coding for a million what-ifs (especially ones that aren’t super-obvious) takes time and effort and costs the client money. It’s the same with coding for a super-flexible system with features that will probably never be used. I’m sure we’d all be a lot happier if we can just think about what is actually needed then deliver a good product at a low cost and improve on it later IF need be. And as I’ve always said “you can’t code for stupidity”. Just like you can’t insure against it.

My preference is XAMPP, its portable (but don’t try to run it from a USB drive, its too slow). However I think WAMP Server is more user friendly. If you’re relatively inexperience with Apache/MySQL administration, I’d go for WAMP Server.