I have attended a SP 2007 developer course (although not done much with it since as SP as a development platfrom beyond webparts looked like a mess of workarounds and deployment headaches)
Anyway for a standalone developer installation you need Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio (with various SP specific tools) all installed on the same (virtual) machine. It was strongly recommended doing this on a virtual image as it would need restarting etc pretty frequently.
I have attended a SP 2007 developer course (although not done much with it since as SP as a development platfrom beyond webparts looked like a mess of workarounds and deployment headaches)
Anyway for a standalone developer installation you need Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio (with various SP specific tools) all installed on the same (virtual) machine. It was strongly recommended doing this on a virtual image as it would need restarting etc pretty frequently.