Request for PHP and ASP Info

[lmarshall]

I see that a lot of employers ask for PHP experience. My colloege teaches ASP but not PHP. I know that these two coding languages are server side. Can anyone please give me information on the differences of these two scripts?

[raf]

The difference?
We'll, i coded for about 9 months in ASP, but i've switched to PHP for new projects. Main reason:
- ASP only runs on IIS (unless you have the chillisoft component or use Perl as a scripting language) and is generally more expensive to host.
- ASP also requires the use of some (third party) components (not always free ones ...) for things like uploading files, sending mail, create images on the fly, creating PDF's, ... PHP has loads of build in functions that make all these things real easy without the use of compents.
- Also, if you're going to build db-driven webapp's, PHP is probably the better choice. It has some nice db-functions for almost all common db-formats. Using PHP with MySQL. And for me, for my personal stuff, MySQL is the best db-option. I think that if you use MySQL, PHP is probably the privilidged scripting language
- In think, don't know this, just my impression, that there are a lott more PHP functions, then VBscript or JScript (main scriptinglanguages for ASP) and that this 'advantage' for PHP will get bigger --> more people writing new PHP-functions and making them puplic (or getting included in new releases) then there are people doing the same for ASP-scriptinglanguages.

Dont know about asp.net. (haven't seriously looked into that.) Maybe that is another option.
If you're a proffessional coder you might need to concider other criteria. I think there are more paid jobs for ASP or ASP.NET or JSP - coders then for PHP coders. I also almost never saw it in a joboffer (sometimes as one from a depressing long list of required languages). But your post might suggests the contrary.
Where i currently work, PHP is not one of the 45 (!) supported languages, and i never saw it in one of the jobprofiles.
Maybe it's different where you live or in the firms you're looking at ...

Personally, i think you should learn them both. At least get the basic knowledge and syntax + control of flow structures. It doesn't take you more then a few days to get the basics and to be able to make some smaller app's with it.

[STDestiny]

PHP was also specifically designed with the web in mind. It includes features that let you do things more easily than languages such as ASP and Perl. For instance, it has a mail() function, whereas in other languages, you have to manually create email headers and do alot of other junk.

[Bullschmidt]

PHP is more like C and ASP is more like BASIC.