Resources
Here are some helpful websites for PHP, SSI, and ASP.
Learning PHP: The What's and the Why's By Elizabeth Fulghum
The Home of PHP, PHP.net
LearnASP.com By Charles Carroll
ASP Tutorial From W3Schools
Learning SSI - Include Me In!
Setting up a server on your hard drive.
You can set up your computer as a Apache web server for testing out your includes. It makes it so much easier when you can test your pages right on your hard drive. Not only that, but if you want to learn PHP, it will provide you with a testing server to test your scripts as you go along. Much faster than stopping to upload your pages, test them, then modify them and upload them again. As an added bonus, you can also use MySQL to test out your databases, experiment with different shopping carts, CGI scripts, and and other server based technologies.
You can set all of this up yourself, installing all of the various components. The above link for "Learning PHP: The What's and the Why's By Elizabeth Fulghum", will tell you what you need and where to get it. However, when I first decided to do this, I found their tutorials on setting the components up a little hard to follow. So I looked around at different ways of doing this. After visiting a few forums, I found two easy to use programs that will install all of the components for you.
This first one is the best one I found, in my opinion, and is being maintained and updated. This is the one I use for my testing.
Apache Friends
They have installation packages for Linux, Windows and Solaris. They are a non profit group based in Germany so a lot of their documentation is in German. However, they do have english pages and their installer is very easy to use. Here is their download pages.
Once you have this set up, add a folder in the C:\apachefriends\xampp\htdocs folder. This will be your working folder. I have a folder named "www". This is where I build and test my pages. To test a page, start Xampp, then just type this into your web browser: http://localhost/www/yourpage.php.
The other installer I used before Xampp is called IBserver 1.0. This is another easy to use installer for Windows. However, they do not look like they are updating their package and the version of PHP is old. If all you are doing is testing PHP includes, this one will work ok.