The technique of splitting up a information into multiple pages is known as pagination. For web pages it normally means taking a resultset from a database query and only showing a specific number of records per page. There are many variations of how to do this no matter what technology (PHP, ASP, JSP, Coldfusion) you use.
In my attempt to learn PHP I thought I would create a simple web site that does some basic database interaction (select, insert, update and delete), sorting and paging, keyword search, and use some of the new PHP 5 features such as OOP, exception handling and the new mysqli extension for MySQL 4.1 and above.
Once you learn the basics of PHP, you will want to know how to interact with a database and update its data from a web page. MySQL is the most obvious and recommended choice using PHP and is fairly easy to setup.
You can use phpMyAdmin to easiy setup your MySQL database, tables and perform any necessary SQL statements.
In order to setup a proper development environment for your home PC to create and test PHP and MySQL web pages you will need at least three components:
