Probs installing PHP

Hi. I have been using the book "PHP fast&easy development" by Julie C. Meloni - and (as the book says) have been trying to install MYSQL, Apache and PHP4 (in that order) on a system running Red Hat 6.1. All goes well until I run the command to configure PHP4 (on p39) to work with Mysql and Apache: the message at the end said: "ATTENTION ! Something is likely to be screwed up here, because the configure script was not able to detect a simple feature on your platform. This is often caused by incorrect configuration parameters." It told me to attach the debug.log file - which is attached here. Looking at debug.log there is obviously a missing directory /usr/bin/ld and a missing file "lmysqlclient". I am new to Linux - and having followed the procedures in the book and (in fact) having completely re-installed Red Hat - I have no idea why this directory is not there or where to get the file from - also it may have stopped at the first missing file eg. there may be other missing files. Please could you help as I would like to get through this excellent-looking book. regds Simon Garstin