New to PHP, bought a book to help me too.
Book has this php web page but nothing displays on my firefox
<?php
echo "Hello World";
?>
simple PHP5 page
What Webserver?
What have you done with the server to make sure PHP is executed?
Is there anything in your error logs?
download XAMPP if you are testing on a local server. apache server, PHP, and phpmyadmin are already configured and setup. It saved me many headaches!