one doesn't need to rent hosting on a web server to dip their toes into it. You can run a web server on your local system, and test apps from it

In principle I agree with what you said. In point of fact when I do web programming I do all my testing on a localized web server until I'm sure the code is ready for Prime Time®.

I confess to being leery of telling a beginner to set up a local web server. Using a web server and setting one up are two different things. Having seen a lot of questions on the Monastery surrounding web server configuration I think learning to use a web server and learning to set up of your own should be kept as two separate learning paths.

Indeed I have worked with a great number of application folks who write wonderful web applications but don't know spit about setting up or maintaining the web servers they target their code to.

I confess to being leery of telling a beginner to set up a local web server.

What's hard about telling a beginner to type plackup?

Howdy!

That does depend, in part, on the computing environment locally available. On Mac OSX, it's pretty straightforward to activate and use the web server for local stuff.

yours,
Michael

On Mac OSX,

An OS I've never used. Actually if you use the NetBeans IDE they bundle web servers with it and getting your application running on one is a click away. For my Java based web applications I use that IDE extensively for just that reason.

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Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg

There doesn't really need to be any 'setting up' of a web server. While I sort of lean towards 'doing it the hard way first' and learning to use CGI and setting up a web server, there are frameworks (e.g. previously mentioned Dancer) where you can skip the whole 'setting up a web server' step and just get to the 'writing the app' step. When you start your 'app' the web server also just 'starts'.