I understand that this is possible and that Sharepoint is available free of charge but there does not appear to be any guidance on step by step on how to get this in one place.
Any support would be appreciated
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Are there any SharePoint virtual machines available from Microsoft?
and
http://www.matthewjbailey.com/sharepoint-2013-dev-environment/
part of developing and deploying in sharepoint is setting up sharepoint from scratch and that means reading up on sharepoint deployment and architecture!
what if somthing goes wrong?
in this case i usually highly recommend that you start by doing it yourself than having a prebuilt vm with sharepoint as a single deployment as you learn nothing and if anything happens to go wrong youll eaily get stuck! youll soon pick up things very quick by setting it up yourself and learn atlot in the process and it would only strengthen your developments abilities within sharpeoint!
Free of charge is SharePoint foundation, but only version 2010 can be installed on the client system like Windows 7 Pro. If you want to play with SharePoint foundation 2013 you have to install it on the server system. Most of us for this purpose use virtualization (hyper-v, vmware, etc) - we create virtual machine on our PC, which hosts our SharePoint server for development and tests. SharePoint Server 2013 Virtual Machine Setup Guide can be found here: http://www.criticalpathtraining.com/members/