Taking over administering an existing drupal site

and I've never used Drupal before. I got the Apress book "Beginning Drupal 7" and have gone through installing XAMPP, downloading and decompressing drupal, moved droopal to the root directory folder, and created the settings.php file.

Now it is time to create the drupal database. The book tells me to "visit http://localhost/xampp page". I tried visiting it with my web browser but all i get is a page not found error. Am I misunderstanding something or doing something wrong?

Also, I have copied all the files from the ftp client that are being used for the website I am taking over. I want to be able to play with these files as a test site before making changes to the life site. Where should I put them and what else do I have to do to make them work that way?

Thank you in advance