ASP vs. PHP and Learning curve?

hmmm... I've done this trick once already and disagree in any similarities between the two languages.  ASP very clearly is a much more sophisticated scripting language, while PHP offers many programming benefits and the two vastly differ.

My suggestion, if you know ASP, spend your time learning C, C++ or .NET.  Once you know one of these languages it will be much easier to pick up PHP.

One thing nobody has mentioned about PHP is that when using a MySQl database, it's probably the fastest combo available right now. (from what I've experienced and read anyways)

I've priced both PHP and MySQL. Their free. I don't think that ASP or Access is free.

The only thing I don't like about PHP, is their include virtual sucks compaired to ASP. Other then that, I think their fairly equal languages.

Regarding speed and performance, here's an interesting comparison of the PHP and ASP versions of the same search engine script: http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/benchmarks.html

It doesn't use a SQL database though, so the functionality involved here would only include stuff like file operations, arrays/data structures, and lots of string comparisons and even regular expressions. It seems that PHP has a huge gain in speed and scales much better too.

Yes, but they're benchmarks of the ASP and PHP version of a website search script - of how long each version takes to produce results given a search query. The operations involved in such a function would include what i mentioned... and shows how PHP and ASP versions of similar code/algorithm can have such a big difference in the overall application performance. Note that its for _this_ application obviously, and you can't judge overall ASP performance based on that. But it's interesting nonetheless.