Hi guys. I have recently joined this forum, First of All I would like to say all you guys the happy new year with all the blessings of God. I have recently completed my professional degree in Computer Sciences. I want to get into the development field. I want to choose one of these two fields for web develpment Active Server Pages (ASP) or Hyper text preprocessor (PHP) which one is best to start with. All the comments would be highly appreciated. Kindly put your comments based on your experiences.
PHP has around a 70% market share to ASP’s 10%. Running a PHP server costs the salary of the employees that maintain it, ASP costs that plus around $5,000 and up.
PHP has multiple open source projects like Joomla & Drupal to help you along. ASP has none of this, but does have very expensive alternatives that provide half the quality at best.
If you are keen to step up into this field, I’d personally recommend to take on both. But place your focus on PHP. So if there’s need for a order of learning, do PHP first for sure, it will grant you opportunity whether you’d want to work for salary or freelance. There are far more projects written in php than asp. In addition to what the above poster said, on top of free CMSs like Joomla, PHP also has more open source framework that you could use right out of box. Such as CakePHP, CodeIgniter, or Symfony.
The benefit of doing both is that you will be able to handle requests from either sides. The web world is as segregated as it could get, but also focussed at the same time. Whether it be asp or php, both of them ultimately output html to end user. All you need to learn is the difference in syntax and some implementation of methodology behind each. It will greatly widen up your choice of work in the future. On that note, I’d recommend look into Ruby too.
By ASP I assume you mean ASP.NET since ASP itself is basically dead and is only used at sites that haven’t upgraded yet.
.NET actually supports a whole range of different languages including PHP.
I’d recommend learning PHP first but, later, take on ASP.Net too. Both are worth the time and effort required to learn them.
PHP is purely a language, whereas .Net is a framework allowing for multiple languages.
If your goal is to make more money than go with ASP.
I’m in a similar position. I’ve got some experience with both. I’ve done research on 30+ places I would like to work (as a software engineer or web developer) coming out of college. Every single one uses either Java or Asp.Net. There are companies that use PHP, but from my experience they are greatly out numbered by the companies that use Java or Asp.net.
Sell that to Facebook.
Use whichever you feel most productive with - ultimately clients don’t care, they want their sites to work. This question has been argued ad nauseam on these forums, do a search and you’ll find dozens of threads.
practical: PHP has a quicker learning curve, ASP.Net’s is a little steeper due to the .Net framework and other factors. Doesn’t mean one is better than the other, just means you can get up to speed a little bit faster in one over the other (if time is a factor).
hosting: there are plenty of hosts out there for both. Windows hosting won’t cost you anymore than Linux hosting if you do your homework. And PHP can run on both platforms, .Net will only run on Windows.
my 2 cents: i’m with some of the others, spend the time and learn both.
There are bunch of open source projects out there for ASP.Net
http://www.asp.net/community/projects/
also you can find lot of .net related open source projects here
another thing, you can do nice WPF using Silverlight, you can use your same code (may be few changes) without having to learn a new language to do some cool stuff at client end, using silverlight you can run multi-threaded application on client internet browser.
If you are going to use ASP .Net, you have to decide which programming language you are going to use.
I am a PHP programmer who got a job writing C# code using ASP .Net for the State of Montana last year. It was a fantastic learning experience, but I enjoy coding in PHP much more. I recently got a job as a PHP programmer where I make more money than I did as an ASP .Net programmer, and I am much more productive at this job.
What I liked about my experience was how much more strict C# is compared to PHP. I didn’t have a lot of choice in how I programmed, and it really refined my understanding of OOP.
As far as money goes, it just depends. Generally speaking, you probably will make more money as an ASP .Net programmer. But, this is just a generalization and probably is due to the fact that most ASP .Net programmers have college degrees. I think a better question is what you enjoy doing. If you are simply doing something just for the money, that will only provide motivation for a short period of time.