It's becoming clear that I won't make it through my indoctrination as a "real" programmer without some exposure to ASP, even though I would rather spend my time learning PHP. Since I'm not particularly eager to install yet another Microsoft application, I'm looking at Apache::ASP.

My question is, does Apache::ASP provide a complete-enough implementation that I can reasonably learn the syntax and design features that I will be using when, inevitably, I am using Microsoft's version? I don't actually need the code I write to cross platforms, since it's just a learning tool for me, but I don't want to learn habits that will have to be unlearned once I'm forced to do things "the Microsoft way". Any experience shared would be welcome.


Edit to add URL in case anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about: http://www.apache-asp.org/index.html

I wouldn't scum up my webserver with such a hideous excuse for a scripting-platform. I advise you to steer clear of ASP, even if you think you need it. If you feel that you should still take the plunge, consider this : 98% of ASP is VBScript (which is so worthless nobody SHOULD use it) and Apache::ASP is perl-syntaxish. I have written perlscript for ASP pages before, but what's the point? Why not just use PHP? You would hardly be learning realistic ASP by using this module. Please heed my warning and leave ASP alone! If you want to appeal to the business job & get a job as a Web Developer (I advise against that also for other reasons) at least learn ASP .NET. It still sucks, but you get a more free choice of "languages" and at least the performance is better.

php is realy easy to learn language you can use php and php has a wide documentation on the internet

Thanks for the suggestions. Believe me, I don't need any convincing that PHP is far better than ASP. But unfortunately, I will be transferring to a school that will require me to learn and use ASP, so I won't have much choice. You've answered my question, lackluster, even though it's not the answer I was hoping for. Thank you both.

I have sick feeling you're going to use windows . If you don't though and use the ChiliSoft! implementation for ASP, please let me know how it turns out as I've never known anyone to use it.

Hmm... Someone told me that Sun One ASP (formerly Chilisoft) was only available as a trial version or a pay version, and like a fool I believed him. Now that I actually bother to go to the site and look, I find that there is a developer version, which is unrestricted except that you can't deploy what you create with it. It looks good to me -- a lot better than running ASP.NET on IIS. I think I'll give it a try.

Too bad they don't use JSP.