Why I preferred to develop Joomla on local offline system?

Joomla is a handy CMS and pretty easy to learn. When I started working on Joomla, I used to develop my sites on a live server. Although this was seemingly a convenient approach as I wasn't required to save anything at two places. Secondly, I thought I could update my site quickly for my website's visitors. Sadly, this didn't worked out as convenient as I thought.

1. Slow speed of Internet Connections in India didn't helped my cause.
2. Sometimes, I wanted to see the results and check it before letting the visitors to see it. Although this is possible by keeping my site offline and using a password to see the updated site, but it brought my whole site offline.
3. I also wanted to update the images and delete or rename from Joomla's directory as required but again this was not very convenient even through the media manager for me.
4. Naturally, when you are experimenting too many things, doing so on a live server especially on shared server which had sites of my other clients as well, could be a risky affair.
5. Last, but not the least, it also saved precious bandwidth as most of my data used to waste due to frequent reviews and undoing things.

I got to know about Wamp Server, but as Joomla Versions were updated, I found out that it no longer supported the higher versions of PHP and MySQL (Mind you, that I didn't spent too much time on research here).

And then, I started with Xampp. You can download the Windows version from here: https://www.apachefriends.org/download.html

The setup is quite large, so please use a fast connection to download and do take care of the bills if your bandwidth is at a premium price. The setup is more than 100 MB. Once its downloaded, you can install it like any Windows Application / Software.

How to install Joomla on Xampp

There are many articles written on it. I will recommend this one:
http://magazine.joomla.org/issues/issue-mar-2013/item/1110-free-e-book-%E2%80%93-introducing-joomla-30-made-easy

Just to keep the things short, here are the main steps:

1. Extract your Joomla folder to "C:\Xampp\htdocs". Make sure that this folder has a recognizable name and has all the folders and files of Joomla in the root. This will practically mean that you can browse the installation folder from, "C:\Xampp\htdocs\yourjoomlafolder\installation"
2. In the search tab of your windows, type Xampp control panel, select it from the list of similar programs and then hit the start tabs of Apache and MySQL as shown in the image. The button will now show STOP. Leave it as it is.
3. Start your favourite browser. I use Google Chrome.
4. Type localhost/phpmyadmin to open the databases and make a new database as required.
5. Note that by default, all your databases will have the username as "root" while the hostname as "localhost". Also you don't need a password, so you can leave its field blank.
6. On your favourite browser, type localhost/yourjoomlafolder which should take you to the installation screen
7. Install the Joomla as you do it on a live server and its done! You are ready to go.

Installation Freezes on "Creating DatabaseTables"?

1. If you are facing this issue, just browse to yourjoomlafolder\installation\sql\mysql and open "joomla.sql" in wordpad.
2. Hit Ctrl+H to open "Find and Replace"
3. Type "ENGINE=MyIsam" in "Find what" and type "ENGINE=InnoDB" in "Replace with"
4. Hit Replace All and save your file
5. Start the installation again, and now it should work fine.