A lot of beginners do not know what to use and where to start when begin with PHP, a open source programming language with no official support. PHP on its way spreading the world programming community come with many commercial tools to help developers more productive. Tools varies from small, cheap coding programs to very deluxe, expensive IDE with all of dreaming utility a PHP developer wish to have. Here are a set of FREE but powerful tool I recommend for a PHP developer:

• PHP eclipse: Based on Eclipse open source IDE, PHP eclipse is the best FREE IDE for coding with its own PHP parser, Apache webserver and debuger. Eclipse can also work with share projects using CVS source control. Speed can be problem as it runs on Java Runtime engine and you must care about new update.
• Zend Studio Neon Beta: Zend Studio release versions are commercial but the beta is free without some cool tools displayed each time you start.
• NuSphere  phpEd:  It will be my mistake if not mention this dreaming php coder IDE. Just one thing I don’t like about it is … the cost of ownership.
• SqlYog community version: SqlYog is the best choice for Windows users to manage MySQL database. Addressing almost every need of developers, this tool is much more better than MySQL administrator and MySQL Query created by MySQL.
• Navicat: Another MySQL GUI tool, support both Windows and Linux but it’s just best choice for Linux users as SQLYog has not support Linux yet.
• DBDesigner: FabForce DbDesigner is totally free database schema designer tool. DbDesigner can connect to a selected database on MySQL to reverse tables into design element and synchronize between your design and database.
• XAMPP: A very stable server suite including Apache 2.x, PHP5, MySQL 5 and FileZilla. XAMPP is available in both Windows and Linux
• XCHM: Most of manual are in CHM version and developers always need to refer to the manual while programming. Windows users do not have problem with .chm files but Linux users need a third party tool. Though there are many .chm reader for Linux, I found XCHM the most easy to use and install.
• FireFox web developer toolbar: an extremely helpful toolbar for FireFox, support you to view HTML code, show CSS and debug JavaScript.
• W3C validators: to ensure that generated HTML and CSS are following W3C standards, W3C help developers with their online tool to validate code and inspect errors.
• TortoiseSVN: SVN client for Windows. This tool helps developers using PHP Eclipse work with SVN servers as PHP Eclipse does not support SVN very well.