The NuSphere package out of the box makes life easy but to get the "real" hand on things, I suggest you install Apache, ActiveState, MySQL, and PHP manually to get the real hang of things. That way, you know what you have for certain. They're not really hard to install; there's just a higher learning curve but in the end it all evens out. For example, by default SSI isn't enabled inside httpd.conf on Apache so you'll have to learn how to do it manually.
qasic
