With just a quick, supporting note today, John Lim has posted to the PHP Everywhere blog about the Zend Core download that Zend offers to help make installing PHP and its friends even easier.

I'd like to point out that one of the greatest services to the PHP community that Zend is providing is the free Zend Core for Oracle and Zend Core for DB2. The latest versions install PHP 5.1.6. The little known secret is that these 2 installers are perfect for MySQL as the mysql and mysqli extensions are included in the release.

He also recommends it for the IISers out there because of the FastCGI support built in.