Richard
Xampp, MYSQL, apache tomcat
David K
Start with wordpress.com if just for fun. It's free but may show ads unless you pay an annual fee of approx $60. The nice thing is you'll have a website within 30 minutes of starting. And your local public library has 'how to' books on using Wordpress if you get serious.
Robert J
All you need is a simple text editor such as notepad, notepad++, wordpad etc.
Web pages are just plain text with "markup" tags, a word or command surrounded by <> like <something> to tell the web browser how to format them for display.
Images are saved as separate files, with an img tag containing the URL (web address) of the image for the browser to show at that part of the page.
Further formatting is done with CSS (another plain text system), which allows customisation of the various tags content display - but you do not have to use that to start with.
You may also need an FTP client to transfer the files to the web server; some account have a built-in file manager, others do not - or once you get in to crating pages, it can be easier to send things from your PC rather than swapping around between different things.
"CoreFTP" is good.
Or there are integrated editors with FTP, syntax checking and project management all built in; I use one called "Webuilder" which works very well.
For more info, search "introduction to HTML" and look for the W3Schools page.
keerok
Notepad.
Seriously!
Matt
Wordpress...