Live-editing files on a server is not cool. You should work on projects in a controlled, sandboxed environment on your computer.
Use MAMP for a quick boot, minimal configuration web server with MySQL, Apache and PHP. Good for beginners.
Use Vagrant to create a virtual machine which are replicable (easy to share with a development team) and infinitely customizable.
How To Install Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack on Ubuntu Cool walkthrough if you'd like to walk through manual installation of these via command line.