What language is best?

[whyme953]

which is the best programming language to learn if you know nothing at all?

php seems to be the most popular. as for asp, i'm not much of a fan of microsoft in general. i've heard that cfm is pretty good and i pretty much do all my design in fireworks and dreamweaver, although i dont know if that would make much of a differance.

my primary concerns are how powerfull is the language, and how easy is it to learn.

thanks in advance.

 

[matrics]

There is no best language, each one is better than the others in a specific field

 

[whyme953]

what are the pros and cons of each one?

 

[Peter]

php works on more hosts than asp. cfm I know nothing about and to be honest haven't seen any hosts I have dealt with use it (maybe I just missed it).

PHP is easy enough to learn and with resources like the manual on php.net anything you need to look up is easy to find.

 

[James]

Both PHP and ASP are pretty easy to learn. Also, if you've got some money, ASP can be complimented by Visual Studio, a good development platform for Microsoft technologies (even if it is crap for the things that are supposed to be cross-platform from my own experience, and CSS too).

It comes down to what you want to learn, and why. On the Internet both ASP and PHP serve similar objectives. ASP only runs on Windows servers, but PHP can run on any major platform. I personally use PHP for this reason, and I'm fond of the open source community. If you are working to become a good Web developer though, you'll want to learn both.

Some clients will insist on ASP, and some servers, even though PHP can be installed, won't have it (and won't install it). PHP is also a requirement, because UNIX is used on the professional level. Perl is also available for advanced programming, and is very popular (and wonderful) for making your CGI scripts. There's Java as well, for applets (though it is slow, and definitely not a necessity for Web designers), and JavaScript, which you should also at least know the basics of.

 

[Pablo]

I have lead to believe perl is abit more versitile than php itself, since php is a spinof of perl anyway. But php it abit easyer to learn all you need is a good php book for learning aswell as a good referance book. i would sugest wrox, beggining php 4. That book has been good to me and offers many examples. you can find it in amazon.com just search for it, good price for a great book.
As for ASP i have some books, but aint learning that at this time so cant provide insite into it.

 

[James]

PHP and Perl are both used for different things, for the most part, so regardless of similarities and shortcomings between the languages the importance of which should be learned first depends on what one wishes to do with them.

 

[Roenick]

are there any good free hosts you would recommend that would allow you to fool around with php?