Ease Of Programming

[pritam79]

Hello there, I am new to scripting languages and have done some simple stuff like forms, sessions etc and how they work in PHP. Also I went through the similar aspects of ASP. But I found the ASP programming constructs a bit difficult to master for people who have just started learning scripting languages. May be that’s not the case for experienced programmers, but I just get the feeling that PHP is easier to understand and master. Please tell me which language would be better to start off with. Thanks to all.

[smerny]

i've never done asp but i like php a lot and it is more universal/available than asp... and free

[boen_robot]

The problem with ASP is that you aren't really learning ASP... you're learning the language you use to program in ASP.If you want, in ASP you can use JScript, C#, VBScript and other languages. Either way, you need to learn that other language first, not ASP. What ASP provides are a few additional APIs (classes and functions) for that language to use. Nothing more, and nothing less.Having said that, PHP is sure easier to learn, because when you learn PHP, you learn the PHP language first and only.

[pritam79]

So what should a beginning programmer (programmer for the web) start off with- ASP or PHP? One more question, there are lots of PHP tutorials available (pdf format) but they do not seem to provide all details of a language. Are those tutorials not sufficient to master any language because i have been told so?

[justsomeguy]

No, tutorials won't really help you master anything, books are a lot better at explaining the details just because there is so much to cover. School classes are even better. Most tutorials just scratch the surface. There are a lot of good books here:http://oreilly.com/pub/topic/phpI prefer the Programming PHP book for a starter, there are also books that deal with using both PHP and MySQL. Take a look also at the Learning PHP 5 book, that one calls itself a tutorial but still has 368 pages.