why would you say that?!?! xfairguy? everything has its meaning. do you really think that asp doesn't help you at all? in my case, it does. You should learn PHP from now on, but i am sure that asp may be of a great help even in studdying PHP.
I think that it is better to specialize in just one. If I am starting now I would go with PHP. PHP has a larger market now,more good open source software is written in PHP, cheaper hosting, free database.
I think ASP is still a good choice as many websites use asp even now, but i would recommend you to go for Asp.net. According to microsoft .Net will drive the next-generation of Internet. You can make big bucks if you can master this technology. Many asp sites are translating into asp.net.
Jump straight into ASP.Net, and 2.0 rather than 1.1 I work as a contract programmer, and the only ASP work I get is converting sites to ASP.Net.
Learn them both. As far as I can see, right now's an amazing time (as far as money goes) to have asp in your tool belt. From one perspective, it's annoying and boring. OTOH...there are companies boat loads of money for it. M$, as far as I can tell, has outdone themselves with asp.net 2.0. This is the first time in about 10 years that I've actually been excited by something they've done.
Or, at least, try to find a job that lets you use the new one. There's not much more to learn than drag & drop. As much as I hate microsoft and their products...this may be the best thing they've released since...oh, windows 3.1. Amazingly, it feels good to be this wrong about something.
It's not totally dead, but, you would probably be better off with PHP. I have a site ( CyberCoded.com) designed around ASP with software and scripts for developers. It still gets a lot of traffic and pays for itself, but, I get several requests every week for the programs to be rewritten in PHP/MySQL. Unfortunately, at this stage of the game it is beyond my schedule to start over. Although I program in other MS Visual Languages, ASP.net never got my attention, and if/when I decide to start again I will be looking towards PHP. And this is really not much different than what has happened to programmers since PC's were available. First we started with Basic, then GW Basic, Pascal, C, C++, Visual Basic, etc... etc... etc.... I have had to learn at least part of a new language on average every 2 -3 years. And that gets old after awhile.
PHP is server side, so it doesn't really concern your users at all what you develop in. I agree about Mono though, it's an interresting project.
Mono is a brain-dead idea. MS will keep changing their language definitions. Mono will have to change horses in mid-stream to try to keep up. It's one of the lamest ideas I've ever heard. Ranks almost up there with WINE. (We're going to try to do everything you claim you do. As soon as you publish the details about what you're doing, we're going to try to emulate that.) No offense to the MONO (or WINE) developers out there. It just strikes me as a complete waste of time. Developers want to go cross-platform? wx. Or *really* twist your brains around, learn lisp, and switch to something like clim. But mono's a loser's game. (Hey, we can catch up with them if we just try harder...)
c# (and, now, vb.net) is pretty much MS' version of java. MS has been trying to sweep C underneath the rug for at least 10 years now. Have they finally succeeded?
Completely and totally depends. PHP is great for "hack it out quick" sites. MS turned up the volume with asp.net 2. They kind of said "screw the script kiddies. We don't care." Now it's all about hard-core enterprise applications. Although they're still using tables for their site layout. Grr.
Somehow, I have a hard time envisioning long-term hard-core legacy ASP supporters. Sort of ranks up there with long-term, hard-core COBOL supporters. But, hey, to each his own.