Hope you've recovered from Part 1, now onto Part 2 - Development Tools!
Which tools you use is a very personal choice, but I'll let you know what I use here. Hopefully others will have some insight into this too. I find many people get stuck in their ways and refuse to switch away from the tools they started with, so I think it's best to hear what other's use now and then to make sure you've got the best tools for the job.
PHP
Here you have the choice of a complex IDE or a simple text editor. I like to know exactly what's going on with my code, so I prefer to use a text editor for my PHP.
I notice you've mentioned NotePad++, if you're comfortable with this, stick with it. Personally I use Programmer's Notepad (
http://www.pnotepad.org/)
If you decide to go down the IDE route I'd suggest trying to Zend Studio, however this isn't free (or cheap!) and is only really useful when you get into more advanced online applications.
MySQL
Nothing really comes close to phpMyAdmin for a WAMP setup (
http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/downloads.php).
It's easy to use and very powerful. I'd suggest trying to get to grips with MySQL Server at the command line at some point too, but most of your MySQL work will probably take place in phpMyAdmin.
It's rather straight forward to install;
- Download and UnZIP into your Apache htdocs directory
- Navigate to this directory through your web browser
- A page will be shown with a link to the configuration editor
- Go to this and put pop a server into the config (localhost, port 3306, username will be root while your password will be whatever you set up during the MySQL setup - or blank if you did not specify a password)
- Save the configuration file and copy it from phpmyadmin/config/ to /phpmyadmin/
More help can be found at (
http://www.phpmyadmin.net/documentation/#setup)
You're done...
Good luck, you should be all set, start making .php files and popping them into your htdocs folder!