Need help getting started

I am completely new to PHP and PEAR, so please excuse me if I ask a stupid question or two. I am trying to learn PHP, and would like to do that inside a framework. Anyway, I have Apache 2.0.63 installed with PHP 5.2.6, and both appear to be running successfully with default configurations. I can make basic examples from tutorials work properly. Here is my problem. I want to install the Symfony framework, and the installation instructions are this: $ pear install symfony/symfony I am running on windows and don't know how to translate this. I tried: c:\PHP5>pear install symfony/symfony I got: 'pear' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file Turns out Pear was not installed with PHP5, so I added Pear to the PHP installation using the PHP5 installer. Now I have a go-pear batch file in my PHP5 directory, but it gives me an error as well. Here is the error I am stuck on: (go-pear) phar "C\PHP5\PEAR\go-pear.phar" does not have a signaturePHP Warning: require_once(phar://go-pear.phar/index.php):failed to open stream: phar error: invalid url or non-existent phar "phar://go-pear.phar/index.php" in C:\PHP5\PEAR\go-pear.phar on line 1236 PHP Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required 'phar://go-pear.phar/index.php' (include_path='.;c:\php5\pear') in C:\PHP5\PEAR\go-pear.phar on line 1236