PHP and ASP are both web programming languages. PHP is an open source language that can run on multiple operating systems and multiple web servers. ASP is a Microsoft language that can only run on Microsoft platforms -- that is, servers running some version of Windows and some version of IIS (Microsoft's web server).
One of the benefits of using ASP is that you pretty much do all of your programming in ASP .NET, an "IDE". IDE stands for "Integrated Development Environment". It's basically a text editor on steroids.
When doing PHP development, you're most likely going to use a programmer's editor (UltraEdit, Homesite, etc) that recognizes PHP scripts and can do some fancy syntax highlighting, but you won't get the debugger or built-in PHP language help documentation like you do with ASP.
There are PHP IDEs though, they just cost money. For example check out Zend Studio.
The question most people ask is "Which should I learn?" I have to answer this question with another question -- "Why not both?"
The thing about PHP is that it's free. You have a wonderful language homepage (
http://www.php.net/) with mirrors around the world. The language documentation is easily searchable and constantly updated and maintained, not just by the language authors, but by users like you and me who might have something useful to add.
That said, most companies that use PHP are small companies who like to minimize costs by running free software. "LAMP" is an acronym that stands for "Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP" -- by far the most common free web server setup. (Linux is the OS, Apache is the web server, MySQL is the database, and PHP is the server-side web scripting language).
So if you want a well-paying job, I'd recommend getting really familiar with ASP, since if a company wants to use ASP for their backend language, you already know that they're not afraid to spend more money.
If you'd like to go into business for yourself as a freelance web developer, I'd learn PHP, since it's by far the most flexible choice. Knowing how to program in PHP well allows you to write applications for most webservers on most operating systems.
The best approach, therefore, is to pick the language that's EASIEST to learn, so that you can get your head around the concepts that are common across languages for ALL web development. PHP is good for this because there are SOOOO many sources of good, free support (like this forum, for example).
Once you're familiar with PHP, you can start learning ASP. Learning ASP will seem easier than PHP because you've already tackled many parts of the learning curve by picking up PHP. You can write ASP versions of stuff you've written in PHP to see how these languages compare and contrast.
Take care,
Nik
http://www.bigaction.org/
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