A month or so ago I created my first LAMP stack and implemented a simple web site that exercised each letter in that acronym. However my development setup was much less than ideal. I don't really have a local test server, but instead I was writing all of my CGI scripts in vim while ssh'ed into the remote machine as root. Now I intend to start more serious development.

Question: What is a good setup so that development goes as easily as possible?

I would like to understand what is available to me along the lines of an IDE, subversion (or alternatives), uploading and downloading content, and just best practices. I'm pretty new at all of this. Also, feel free to point me at good websites. There's plenty of websites, but only people who are already heavily developing web content are able to quickly determine if they are good websites.