Installing Wordpress Locally - Starting Your Local Wordpress Workflow
Installing Wordpress locally is the first step in your local Wordpress workflow. You need to have MAMP installed (for mac, WAMP for PC) in order to allow PHP to run on your desktop.
You also need to download a fresh install of Wordpress from http://wordpress.org. So the steps are as follows:
Download MAMP (or WAMP)
Download Wordpress.org (self-hosted)
Create directory for your site (htdocs is default)
Create database
Copy Wordpress files over to your directory
Set up your wp-config.php file
Load up your site and follow instructions
Also note that the default username and password for databases in MAMP is root & root.
Some links that might be useful:
http://wordpress.org/
http://www.mamp.info/en/