start playing with home servers
 

hi there! i am Mike from Italy, first time here.

I am a Linux user and a LAMP developer.
I use to run LAMP over my pc to work in my localhost and upload.

Well, i'm not an Apache Guru but i'm quite good in installing modules, extensions, edit the configuration files, and so on.

I'd like to run my own home LAMP server that hosts my website.

Do you know a good book or a guide that can help me?

Do i need the maintainer to point my domain to my server's ip address?

What you would need to do is setup your machine just like you want it. Then you have 2 options:
1. Purchase a domain name from a place like godaddy.com or another registrar. Then add your servers IP to the nameservers. (This only works if your server has a static IP address)
2. Use something like http://www.dyndns.com/ to setup a domain name and then run a client on your server to auto update the IP address. (This works best for dynamic IP addresses)

As long as you can setup your LAMP server and run it already I don't see any problems with trying to make it public.