If you're getting into development, and are looking for a convenient way to set up a development environment on your machine without creating a lot of clutter that you can't easily uninstall later, one great solution is Vagrant, which allows users to script out the creation of virtual environments in programs like VirtualBox. Both are free software, and although there is somewhat of a learning curve to set it up yourself, if you'd like to just have a quick and easy setup, I've developed a set of setup scripts that will allow you quickly run a virtual machine setup, enter the virual machine's command line, and install things like MySQL (MariaDB), PHP, Python and Node.js so that you can develop using any or all of those languages.
