First of all, you'll need hosting space; a place on a web server where you can set up your site to make it accessible to anyone with Internet access. Your hosting account should support the PHP scripting language (as Joomla! is written in PHP); it should support the type of database that Joomla! uses, called MySQL; and it has to run the Apache server software. Specifically, these are the system requirements for Joomla! 1.5:

You shouldn't have any difficulty finding hosting accounts that meet these system requirements. If you're not sure, any hosting provider should be able to tell you if they support Joomla!.

You can find detailed system requirements at the Joomla! official help site: http://help.joomla.org/content/view/1938/302.

To transfer files from your computer to a web server, you need special File Transfer Protocol (FTP) software. An FTP program is comparable to the Windows file Explorer or the Mac Finder. You use it to manage files and move them from one place to another—the only difference being that the FTP program allows you to move files from your computer to your hosting space on a web server (and vice versa).

If you're new to FTP, perform a Web search for 'FTP Tutorial' to get familiar with the basic procedures. See for example http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/ftp.

If you're perfectly happy with whatever your current browser may be, you won't have any trouble managing your Joomla! site with it. However, people creating websites often install more than one browser on their computer. Apart from the ever-popular Microsoft Internet Explorer (www.microsoft.com), you might want to install the up-and-coming Google Chrome (www.google.com). But you'll definitely want to use Mozilla Firefox (www.mozilla.org). Having more than one browser allows you to check if your site looks OK in all of the major browsers.

A special benefit of having Firefox at your disposal is that there are many extensions for this browser that will make your web developing life much easier. One of these is Firebug that helps you to style your web pages (more about Firebug in Chapter 11 on templates). Another great Firefox plugin is FireFTP that turns your browser into a full-blown FTP client. Go to http://fireftp.mozdev.org to see how it works and to download a copy.