First of all, you need to know Imagick is a PECL extension which means it will not be available at many shared hosts. You will usually need access to compile php yourself.
The pear method (shared)
If you have pear installed and a copy of phpize (if you didn't compile php, it comes in the package php-dev or php-devel or php5-dev or php5-devel), this is by far the easiest method.
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pecl install imagick-beta
This isn't really compiling by hand, but this is a bit less automated than that above. It also works for the latest cvs copy of Imagick. Download the tar from pecl.php.net and extract it. You can then run these commands to compile and install Imagick.
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phpize && ./configure && make install
Please set up extension_dir to the location where imagick.so was generated. Then add `extension=imagick.so` to the php.ini file so that the shared extension is loaded.
Compiling Imagick statically
TODO
* Windows users may download Imagick from http://pecl4win.php.net/ext.php/php_imagick.dll (does not link straight to the .dll). As of the time of this writing, wheels are moving to get a recent version of Imagick up there (versions <=1.0 are very old and come from a previous attempt at an extension, 2.0 is the OO extension and is NOT FOR PHP4).