Drupal Camp Seattle sandbox

I know this is a rookie question, but I've never set up a personal sandbox on my laptop, can anyone give a brief overview on how to set up a php environment?

Mac or PC?

On the new Macs I think, but am not sure, everything is pre-installed. I have an older Mac and I had to install MySQL and enable PHP in Apache. It was a while ago so I don't remember the details.

On Windows I believe people are having good results with xampp: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html

Or you can do the installs individually, You'll need Apache, PHP and MySQL. I took this route because I hadn't heard of xampp.