Provided your system has the resources to accommodate a virtual machine, you could try a much cleaner approach. You can install a pre-made lamp stack from bitnami or turnkey. This approach is cleaner because your host system is left unaffected. Plus you get to play - if you like - with a bunch of different technologies like connecting to and managing a remote server (either through the web interface or via command line), configuring networks, setting-up/modifying ssl settings, etc. You can explore at your heart's content and it's a great learning experience.

Edit: Just to make things clear. Both bitnami and turnkey offer native installers for a wide range of operating systems. This option installs a full blown stack on your machine. What I am referring to in my answer is the virtual machine option. In this case you will download a ready-made virtual machine and run it with vmware (free player) or VirtualBox (free). This option is what I refer to as "clean" because it is completely autonomous from your host system and portable (you can copy the virtual machine files to another host at any time with no need to reconfigure anything)