tutorials
 

For learning Java, I think you can hardly beat Sun's online Java Tutorial:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/

For PHP, the online manual has a very short tutorial and has the advantage of user-contributed comments at the bottom of each page:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/

For Perl, the online tutorial mentioned at the Learning Perl web site (http://learn.perl.org/) is a start, but probably best to buy a book. I would advise learning some Perl before going on to PHP (which shares much of its syntax) but maybe that's just because that is the order in which I learned things. Perl is much more useful in a general UNIX context while PHP is usually only used in the context of web pages.

For Apache & PHP, the series of articles at MacDev are quite good:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/ma...aguar_pt1.html

But back to your original question about how to set up your firewire disk, I would partition it (with Disk Utility) to have two partitions: one the same size as your Mac's internal hard drive, the other with all the rest of the space. Make both partitions HFS+
Then use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your current (internal) hard-drive onto the partition that is the appropriate size. Then you can boot your Mac from that partition and fool around as much as you want with no worries about ruining your system, but you will still have all the apps etc that you are used to. But the sorts of things (programming) that you intend to do will not be able to harm your system anyway. The only risk to your system (software) would be if you wanted to start to fool around with system software modifications, etc. Or if you experimented with dangerous commands as root in Terminal (e.g. rm -rf / )

thanks for the links... i really appreciate your help.

i have a 120 gb lacie firewire drive that i am going to use as my experimental/learning disk. i just don't understand why i would need to partition it the same size as my system disk. i mean, my startup drive now is about 14 gb and if i partition it for that size, then is it possible to install fink on the other empty partition? i am just thinking i would run out of space once i start installing unix programs with fink.

i might just partition it in two equal sizes, is this a good idea? i guess if i need more space i could use ccc to move it to another disk and re-partition it. so maybe this is a stupid question... lol.

thanks for your time.

cloning
 

I suggested making one of the partitions the same size as your internal disk so that you could use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your internal disk onto that partition. If you clone onto a bigger partition, you are will have unused space on that partition. You could add new files that would make use of that extra space but part of the ide of making a clone of your internal disk is that the clone would also serve as a backup of your internal disk in case the internal one failed. I.e. I am imagining a scenario where you start by cloning your internal disk onto a partition on the firewire disk. Then you play around a bit using that partition. Then (a few days or weeks later) you decide to make a fresh backup of your internal disk and so you erase the partition and do the clone again. Etc.

You could use the other partition for things you want to keep, longer-term projects etc.