ASP or PHP

[weknowtheworld]

Hi,

I am a PHP programmer then should i learn ASP to increase my skills?

Thanks..

[obsidian]

It all depends on what you're headed for and what environment you're looking into delving. IMHO, it's great for someone to learn .NET for the experience and [i]well-roundedness[/i] it provides. One other note, in my recent job searches, I've found that someone writing in C#.NET gets paid a decent percentage higher than someone writing the exact same app in PHP. The difference I've found is the realm of use. Most (practically all) of the major universities around the US I've contacted use ASP.NET (either VB or C#) for their application development. The businesses that can afford to have their own private web development team seem to follow the same trend. What interested me, though, was the amount of [b]major[/b] web development companies that write in PHP primarily for all their clients. It really makes sense, though, since those companies cut their overhead quite a bit when they port over to an open source solution like PHP.

In a nutshell, I'd definitely recommend someone to take the plunge and learn .NET if they have the opportunity to do so, but don't do it at the expense of having time to expand your PHP knowledge.

[Ninjakreborn]

[quote]In a nutshell, I'd definitely recommend someone to take the plunge and learn .NET if they have the opportunity to do so, but don't do it at the expense of having time to expand your PHP knowledge.[/quote]

I think that was very well said, because I believe (personally just my opinion), php is the language for me.  I have "played" with some ASP (not .net), and done just a few very small things with it (registration form/login system), adn some other small things.  I greatly prefer php, but I have heard a lot of things about .net, but I think that piece of advice obsidian offered is priceless, and very well said.  "nice wording too", because that would be the best advice you can use.

[steelmanronald06]

I took a visual basic class in college, which included ASP.  Personally, I didn't need the class because it is so basic...just remember you don't need semi-colons in asp.  The only reason I would see learning it is if you plan on getting a job for a microsoft based company.

[Ninjakreborn]

Actually he is right.
Asp is very, very simple after you know php.  I was able to pick up asp in about 30 minutes and built an entire login membership system (no errors, just coded it, and it worked).
No problems except checking up the syntax
so if you know php, doing asp isn't that hard, I just wouldn't take the time to memorize syntax.

[obsidian]

[quote author=businessman332211 link=topic=121808.msg507512#msg507512 date=1169088766]
Actually he is right.
Asp is very, very simple after you know php.  I was able to pick up asp in about 30 minutes and built an entire login membership system (no errors, just coded it, and it worked).
No problems except checking up the syntax
so if you know php, doing asp isn't that hard, I just wouldn't take the time to memorize syntax.
[/quote]
That is quite the simplification there. If you're going to learn ASP.NET and do it right, it's not as simple as just throwing something together and it working. I dare say that someone who simply wants a script to work and doesn't care how solid the code is could definitely jump right in and hack together some code snippets and get something to work. The only problem is, you really don't know .NET that way. If someone is wanting to really [i]know[/i] ASP.NET, I would recommend they take the time to thoroughly (or as thoroughly as possible) learn C# and the nuances of that language in addition to the proprietary ASP syntax. Between the actual language differences in the core and the proprietary markup elements that ASP requires, there is a [b]lot[/b] more to ASP than initially meets the eye, should one take the time to study it.

Also, I think Ron was referring to the [i]class[/i] being basic, not necessarily the language... but I could be wrong here.

[Nameless12]

there are other languages out there to you realize?

perl
python
ruby

all three of those languages are used for web development, ruby on rails is quite big and python is probably my fav of the bunch. Php has its purposes but for the most part the only reason I use it is becuase I devoted to much time and effort to it to give it up.

If you are trying to increase web development skills and not programming skills I would remind you about the following
xml
xslt
xhtml
javascript
ajax
photoshop

And if you were more interested in becoming a better programmer I would recommend reading the c all in one desk reference for dummies cover to cover. Learning c has many advantages even if you dont plan on using the language for development.

And yes there is more. Dont forget your databases I would recommend postgres and more advanced features of sql if you want to increase your skills.

If you go the route of .Net I would say go with c# but there are better alternatives such as ruby on rails & python

[obsidian]

[quote author=Nameless12 link=topic=121808.msg508618#msg508618 date=1169220498]
If you go the route of .Net I would say go with c# but there are better alternatives such as ruby on rails & python
[/quote]

RoR is not bad, but it's not nearly as widely used in the corporate market as some would have you believe. We looked into using it here for some applications, and after a few months, we decided against it. Don't get me wrong, as a language, it's incredible, but there's comparatively little solid support for it. Yes, I'm aware of the communities, tutorials, etc... but once you get beyond the very basics, there's not much there. For the corp level doing our own dev in-house, it's too much of a jump for us.

I would definitely recommend Python. Again, not a lot of wide application usage yet, but it's growing quickly. I think that it all comes down to what has been mentioned before... what's your market for work? Are you working for a web dev company? If so, you'll want to have a solid base in several of the aforementioned languages. If you're looking at being involved with a single corp and developing in house apps, you'll need to pick a mainstay and go with that one. Very few organizations are going to support different application environments within one entity. At the university level, I've noticed that there is typically a split attention: Java for hardcore, behind the scenes applications and PHP or .NET for web related UI applications. With that said, I still believe that the knowledge of ASP is definitely worth having, although, I wouldn't study it at the cost of loosing ground on PHP.

[tomfmason]

[quote author=businessman332211 link=topic=121808.msg507512#msg507512 date=1169088766]
Actually he is right.
Asp is very, very simple after you know php.  I was able to pick up asp in about 30 minutes and built an entire login membership system (no errors, just coded it, and it worked).
No problems except checking up the syntax
so if you know php, doing asp isn't that hard, I just wouldn't take the time to memorize syntax.
[/quote]

I can tell you right now that php is  much easier to work with. There are several things that are handled by php by default that requires other functions to preform in asp. A good example of this would be type conversion.

Here is a simple example of what I mean..

[b]Asp[/b]
[code]
<%
dim name
dim iCount
name = "some_name"
iCount = 10
response.write(name & Cstr(iCount))
%>
[/code]

The output should be [b]some_name10[/b]

Now lets see how you would do that in php..

[code]
<?php
$name = 'some_name';
$iCount = 10;
echo $name . $iCount;
?>
[/code]

Now as you can see the type conversion is automatic with php were as with asp you need to call another function to do that for you. So this is one of the many reasons as to why php is much better then asp. It is faster and more robust.

Tom

[steelmanronald06]

[quote author=businessman332211 link=topic=121808.msg507512#msg507512 date=1169088766]
Actually he is right.
Asp is very, very simple after you know php.  I was able to pick up asp in about 30 minutes and built an entire login membership system (no errors, just coded it, and it worked).
No problems except checking up the syntax
so if you know php, doing asp isn't that hard, I just wouldn't take the time to memorize syntax.
[/quote]

*cough cough cough*  wow!  You managed to build a full login member system with no errors after learning the code in only 30 minutes?  Without the class it would have taken me the better part of 4 days to learn ASP well enough to code a system without errors.  Just because the basic theory behind all languages is the same, I didn't realize that one could learn it that fast.  I must be doing something wrong...*runs to check what he did wrong*

[Ninjakreborn]

No, I think you misunderstood.  I don't know ANYTHING about asp, except some basic system  I had a friend come to me (non-paying project) and he was trying to find out how to get a login system.  I was able to construct him  a basic one in ASP in about 20-30 minutes.  Manually setup the database, and he already had the registration. All he needed was
* user authentification (login)
* logout
So I built him a contact form (XHTML/CSS, and then did enough asp, to check the authentification, and create the sessions, and code for him to run throughout pages that needed password protected.  That is what I mean, I know very little about ASP, I have a friend who does a lot with asp, so I picked up bit's and ieces from him, but I am strictly PHP when it comes to server side (mostly atleast)

[Stopofeger]

Well,
Its way too late to reply, But still I say.
If its asp? then say goodbye. Asp is an obsolete technology.
Everyone shud learn and think of Asp.net now. Asp.net is really complicated and hard grasp. Especially as it has all those event handling in server side which i dont know how its done in http.