Are PHP and ASP even remotely similar?

[pathfinder74]

I was told a while back that they are basically the same thing with different names. as I've been getting a little bit of hands on with PHP I'm finding out that that might be a grossly misleading statement.

If I were to learn choose one as a course to take in college which would be more beneficial as someone looking for a career in Web DESIGN and Graphics?

[Kyrik]

Well that is strictly opinionated, whether or not which one is better and more beneficial...but i like to favor php more because its easy and quick to learn and is free...as unlike asp which you have to buy from microsoft in order to use it i do believe

[hastx]

Yes, they are the "same thing" in the respect that they are both server-side scripting platforms that enable dynamic processing and database interaction, etc. But I guess by that, then Perl, JSP, cold fusion, etc could be thrown on the same heap.

As far as what to learn...the numbers don't lie. What are others using more of and why?

Free...not,
open...not,
multi platform ...not so much.

[ellisgl]

There are some ASP to PHP converters - Don't know how well they work. All I know that the only ASP .NET script for processing a form lead me to yell 'WTF!'. Trying to figure out what it was doing and how it process certain things took me a long while because I literally had to go thru at least 50 files all over the server.

[MrCoder]

Compiled DLL's sound interesting.

Being able to compile a C# DLL and call the functions from within a ASP page, including the COM model of the DLL?

[bokeh]

Compiled DLL's sound interesting.You can do the same thing in PHP. Just write your functions in C, compile them and load them as a PHP extension.