Does anyone recommend creating a website in ASP versus PHP? Which one is better and why? I want to learn how to create website but need a starting point. Should i take classes learning ASP or PHP? Hope someone can help!!

I recommend ASP.NET.

You don't need ASP or PHP to create a web site. You can use static html ( that would be the "technology" ) and Notepad ( that would be the editing application ) if you want to. What ASP/PHP do for you is create "dynamic" html, stuff that changes depending on whatever condition you like. That could be how much stock you have in the warehouse, or the phase of the moon.

If you have a Microsoft web server you use ASP or ASP.NET; if you have a Linux server you use PHP.

Actually, you can use PHP on a Windows Server as well...it's just not a default install. But it does work.

As far as ASP goes, that's what I know (not .NET...that's the Newbie's dept.) If you're going to learn it, do NOT take classes. The code they teach and the way they teach it is outdated, archaic and just plain wrong in a lot of cases.

Major advantages to ASP:

It works and works well with Access databases. If you code it correctly, you can easily have a site that hits 6-digit page views per month with an Access backend. Mind you, you'll probably have to lean on chrishirst and I pretty heavily for that info.

It's not case-sensitive, so if you're someone who like me likes mixed case and ONce IN A WHile TYpes LIke THis, you're forgiven for it relatively easily.

It's easy enough to build custom subs and functions and classes (although I haven't messed much with classes) for whatever purposes you want.

There's a lot of documentation available for it now, contrary to popular opinion. Here are three good sites:

www.haneng.com
www.4guysfromrolla.com
www.asp101.com (good to learn from, but if you do well enough, you will outgrow these code samples).

As far as PHP is concerned...I really don't know the advantages because I can do everything I need to with ASP. So...I'll leave that to someone who actually KNOWS the answer there.

PHP is far more stable and uses MySQL which can do like 7 digit page views

It's very easy to get books and classes on, there is also loads of web documentation.

What more, it's cheaper to find a host to run it off (More people offer it on budget hosting)...or you can run a php environment (such as XAMPP) to tests your scripts on. ASP tends to cost on the £30 a month mark.

PHP is far more easy to program in, for example

PHP Code:

<?php
include 'file URL.php';
?>

includes a file...I shamefully do not know the ASP, but I do know it contains lots of % and stuff...and ASP is un-logical.

I don't mean to sound anti-mircosoft, but ASP is made by mircosoft who have not made a good OS (a maybe programs) in a long time...PHP is free (thats right free) and is made by linux people who fear sun light (Or so i have heard). I gotta say, sun light fearing people would be a lot more safer then mircosoft, cooler too

PHP is more popular than ASP. Almost all decent web hosting companies offer PHP. For ASP, there are fewer web hosting companies and in some cases, you have to pay extra to host an ASP website.
Also, there are far more free PHP scripts than they are of ASP.

PHP is the WAY to go. No doubt about it.

Adam gave good advice.

An ASP server-side include is as easy as the code posted here, except that people tend to only use one line for it. But server-side includes are a way of faking object oriented programming, which ASP.NET can do natively. That's really the biggest advantage for me, I used to use C++ in the early '90s, and now I can use C# and OOP.

ASP, both old and new, run on Visual Basic, which is about as easy as something can be and still be a programming language. You're not forced to use it, but a lot of people do, and there's an unlimited amount of support for the VB language.

Really though the second most important question is if you want to make a career out of this. A lot of low-rent web sites are made in PHP with a hodge-podge mix of downloaded scripts. I'm not saying there aren't good PHP sites, too, but when it comes to spam it's all PHP because PHP is cheaper. Most corporations use ASP or ASP.NET. If you want to be a professional web developer this is one way to go. If you want to make your site work and be done with it, well I still recommend ASP, but you should also consider PHP.

PHP my scripting language of choice... I have dabbled in ASP and immediately quit, because I was not as comfortable with it.

I think both PHP and ASP are a bit complex for the beginner to start coding from day #1, and I would focus on learning HTML and CSS so you can learn how to create dynamic menus and proper page layouts.

If you don't learn the foundations of web design (HTML/CSS) then you will have a much harder time in the long run. Unless of course you plan on using a WYSIWYG editor for your entire life.... but what fun is that?

Thanks guys for the insight...I was also told that i should learn html. Do you recommend taking classes to learn html or just buying the books and programs i need?

For memberpro - I get an error message saying "You must spread some Talkupation around before giving it to memberpro again."

For AutoShopLinks - it depends on your learning style. Some people learn best by having a book, and reading it cover to cover. Others learn by getting their hands dirty. Which are you? That should tell you if you need the book or not.

You already have the software to make and test html, in fact, this is probably the easiest software in the world. So if you're a "tinker with it" kind of learner, then all you need to do is make a text file, put html tags in it, save it, and open that file in your web browser. Then make some changes in your text editor, hit save, and refresh your browser to see them. If you can keep doing that until you master it, then you don't need books, but if that's not your style, maybe some texts would be useful.

Also you can look at the html behind this page by doing a view source, and see what ideas other people use.

There is a misconception that I've noticed and one semi-misconception.

Misconception: ASP costs in the 30 pounds per month range. I don't know where you're looking at Windows hosting, but it's not even CLOSE to that for solid ASP hosting.

www.sectorlink.com
www.webhost4life.com

Those are just two with plans WELL below the 30 pounds per month range.

Semi-misconception: there are plenty of scripts available. The major pro with a script is that it's already coded for you, and the major con with a script is...that it's not necessarily coded for you (or to be more accurate, what your application is.) Scripts usually have to be tinkered with, retrofitted, deconstructed, reconstructed, and by the time all of that's done, you spend more time in 98% of cases doing that than you do just coding from scratch or coding with your own subs and stuff. So scripts aren't always (translation: aren't usually) a good idea.

In my case (and this doesn't apply to others, so I don't count it as a pro), I've also coded 2700 lines of custom ASP subs and functions that I can call whenever I want to cut down on development time. So for me personally, PHP would be almost useless to pick up at this point...then again, I started 7 years ago when ASP, CGI, and Perl were the only games in town (and the latter two are like nuclear quantum physics to me.)

Well another interesting thread. But this time i am going say somthing against Adam. I preferred PHP coz i am familiar with C / C++ Programming, though i now VB and delveloped some desk top applications with VB.

PHP and It's advantages.
1. First Things First. Its FREE

Development tool :
ASP/SQL Server : $0–2499
ColdFusion MX/ SQL Server : $599
JSP/Oracle : $0–~2000
PHP/MySQL : $0–249

Server :
ASP : $999
ColdFusion : $2298
JSP : $0–~35,000
PHP : $0

RDBMS :
ASP : $4999
ColdFUsion : $4999
JSP : $15,000
PHP : $0–220

2. Ease of Use
3. HTML Embeddedness
4. Cross platform compaitability

Work on UNIX Flavors
AIX, A/UX, BSDI, Digital UNIX/Tru64,
FreeBSD, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, Mac OS X,
NetBSD, OpenBSD, SCO UnixWare,
Solaris, SunOS, Ultrix, Xenix, and more

And Works on Windows Flavors
Windows 95/98/ME, Windows NT/2000/XP/2003
Web servers Apache, fhttpd, Netscape IIS, PWS, Netscape, Omni

5. Unlike Cold Fusion, Not Tag Based.
6. Stability

In a two-and-a-half-month head-to-head test conducted by the Network Computing labs in October 1999, Apache Server with PHP handily beat both IIS/Visual Studio and Netscape Enterprise Server/Java for stability of environment.

7. Speed.

many small benchmarks suggest that PHP is at least as fast as ASP and readily outperforms ColdFusion or JSP in most applications.

8. Many Extensions
9. Fast feature development
10. Popularity
11. Not Proprietory

It is not tied to any one server operating system, unlike Active Server Pages. It is not tied to any proprietarycross-platform standard or middleware, as Java Server Pages or ColdFusion are.

12. Strong user communities
All be above features are listed by Tim Converse (Tim boy), Yahoo Search Engineer, but left yahoo last year in dec., and author of PHP5 and MySQL Bible.
Last, but no least.

Originally Posted by Tim

This is where old-school ASP developers invariably say, “PHP sucks!” They think ASP session variables are magic. Not to burst anyone’s bubble, but Microsoft is just using cookies to store session variables—thereby opening the door to all kinds of potential problems.

13. Many stable, OS scripts like, OSCommerce, Drupal, IBP, etc

I don't find anything against these features and advantages, so i prefer PHP.

Originally Posted by AutoShopLinks

Thanks guys for the insight...I was also told that i should learn html. Do you recommend taking classes to learn html or just buying the books and programs i need?

I learned with this tutorial...http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/ ...when I was 16. It may be a bit dated but the fact that it is still around is a testament to it's effectiveness in teaching HTML.

As far as ASP vs. PHP. You will hear many zealots on either side however, what it really comes down to is what you feel comfortable with and what your willing to make a major investment in time, money and other factors with. Either are capable of producing very similar results. Most just prefer PHP because it's not a Microsoft product however, this does not inherently make it [ASP] a bad choice.

I don't mind anyone toting PHP. If you prefer it, that's fine. But what bothers me is when misinformation or outdated information is presented about ASP from people who either don't use it or don't understand it.

ASP session variables are the same as PHP in that the decrypted value for both are stored server-side, NOT client side. If you want to see this for yourself, visit an ASP site and run a tool such as ieHTTPHeaders. It will show you exactly what session IDs go back and forth. So that's wrong.

The speed test may be misleading as well. It was done in 1999 and probably wasn't done using optimized code on at least one of the languages tested. ASP, for example, will not perform anywhere near as well using the scripts from, say, a tutorial site vs. code that has been optimized for speed and resource consumption. The same PROBABLY (I say probably because I truly do not know) holds true for the other three languages compared as well.

Not only that, the testing of resource consumption for a language can only be fairly measured if the same server is used for all four languages. By server, I mean CPU, HD, RAM, OS, hardware installed, software installed, the whole 9 yards. Apples to apples and all that.

This isn't designed to knock PHP. I won't knock PHP or post things about it that I haven't tested myself. I'm just trying to clear up some misconceptions, that's all.

Adam, I feel sorry, if i have posted misinformation about ASP. I have to agree one thing, I DO NOT KNOW ASP. The book was released after PHP5 release, so i thought that it was correct.I have clearly stated that all the features are listed by Tim. Not by me. I preferred PHP. Because it has C like syntax. Another three important factors for my decision are cost, cross platform computability and OS packages with community support.

In the interest of clarity, I want to address some of these points:

Originally Posted by Kirtan

Well another interesting thread. But this time i am going say somthing against Adam. I preferred PHP coz i am familiar with C / C++ Programming, though i now VB and delveloped some desk top applications with VB.

The one you're more comfortable in is probably one of the better reasons to go with a particular technology. But you can use C# to write ASPx code.

Originally Posted by Kirtan

- 1. First Things First. Its FREE

Well this could be misleading, too. ASP itself is free, it just comes bundled with things ( either an O/S license or a colo server ) that often cost a little more using Microsoft. I'm paying $6 a month to host my personal web site on linux, and $8 to host an IT one on WinServ03 with IIS 6.

Originally Posted by Kirtan

Server :
ASP : $999
ColdFusion : $2298
JSP : $0–~35,000
PHP : $0

This one I don't understand at all. If you're talking about the software costs, ASP is an environment IIS provides, and IIS comes with Windows. XP Pro is around $200 and Server '03 is more like $500 for a small business.

Originally Posted by Kirtan

RDBMS :
ASP : $4999
ColdFUsion : $4999
JSP : $15,000
PHP : $0–220

I'm equally confused here. None of these technologies is a relational database management system. If you're suggesting people buy a particular DBMS for each web server ... ASP can connect to MySQL or Oracle, just like PHP can. Or your site might not need to store much structured data, and XML might work better, regardless of the platform you use.

Originally Posted by Kirtan

2. Ease of Use

Some of the new IDEs for ASP ( Visual Web Developer is free from MSDN and excellent ) have come a looooooooong way. Intellisense is the best programming invention since caffeine. And the newest syntax coloring, where primitive data types get one color, complex ones another, and so on, plus "snippets" make writing ASP.NET code really easy. And object oriented, which is more important to me, personally.

I'm not writing all this to give you a hard time, or to evangelize ( although you really should check out Vis Web Dev ). I'm not even trying to convince you to switch over, because for you the strongest reason to use PHP is because you already have experience in it. I'm mentioning all of this because I think the book you're quoting gives an unfairly bad impression of ASP. It's actually a pretty nice platform.

The ASP vs PHP debate is always a pointless one, even more so for the reasons given by the OP.

You do NOT need to know either to create a website. In actual fact you simply could not create a website in either if all you know is a server side scripting language.

Your first priority should be to learn HTML and how to use CSS to make the HTML appear in browsers how you want it to look.
Server side code is simply a means of delivering HTML to user agents from sources such as databases than cannot be viewed by HTTP requests.
To use code to create web pages you need to know how to create pages in the first place.

Again I DO NOT KNOW ASP.

About cost:
If you decided not to host in a shared hosting service, It will happen when you go for big sites, and host yourself, you need windows server, asp and SQL server.

About Book :
I read the book reviews after adam's comment. Yes. It is less than average.

Though PHP works with IIS, it is more stable in apache. I ASSUME vice versa with ASP.

PHP 5 is object oriented. PHPEclipse IDE is free and offer sort of intellisense.

Again, i am using this thread to learn about pros and cons of both PHP and ASP. Not to convince each other. When i searched for ASP Vs PHP, all threads i found were 4 years old. So this thread may contains the latest info of both ASP and PHP.

One of the problems is everyone talks about ASP and then comments on the fact that it is not OOP.
The simple fact is that they are WRONG.

ASP is NOT a language, it is a system that supports TWO languages.
1: VbScript which is not natively OOP but can be persuaded to be almost OOP by using classes. Normally it is a procedural language.
2: JScript which is most definitely OOP

so don't let anybody tell you that ASP is not capable of OOP.

A similar misconception is around ASP.NET, again ASP.NET is NOT the language, it is a framework around which several languages can be used to build the Web Application.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

The ASP vs PHP debate is always a pointless one, even more so for the reasons given by the OP.

Normally, I'd agree with you. Each has its place, each has its followers, and neither is better than the other IMHO. You're also right in that neither is useful without some grounding in HTML and CSS.

However, in this case, what this thread has served to do is illustrate and clear up a lot of misconceptions about ASP in particular. That does have some merit and use. I'm just not sure what the misconceptions are about PHP, since again I do not know it.

Originally Posted by AutoShopLinks

Thanks guys for the insight...I was also told that i should learn html. Do you recommend taking classes to learn html or just buying the books and programs i need?

Books are a way to go. Don't waste your time with going to a class (That only teachers plain MS Style HTML). Also the best scripts to learn are:

HTML - Basicly coding, then get a WYSISYG (what you see if what you get) editor, such as dreamweaver.
CSS - next step up at making faster loading sites will more features that run user end.
PHP - Makes more dynamic websites. Easy to learn.
XML - Worth knowing