I started web developing with PHP and hated it, I always thought it was just me not 'getting' the language or something as it is really popular and it was my first language I ever learnt. Anyway eventually I moved onto ASP.NET which was even worse, web development was painfully dull, slow and boring until I gave ASP.NET MVC a go, which is fast and far more easier to work with than PHP / ASP.NET (well for me at least anyway), it has been designed really well, I really like the razor engine and MVC design.

PHP was really easy to pick up and its amazing for text based games. It also gave me good syntax knowledge for C++. It was so so easy to switch over.

[quote name='Dynamo_Maestro' timestamp='1332455728' post='4924450']
I started web developing with PHP and hated it, I always thought it was just me not 'getting' the language or something as it is really popular and it was my first language I ever learnt. Anyway eventually I moved onto ASP.NET which was even worse, web development was painfully dull, slow and boring until I gave ASP.NET MVC a go, which is fast and far more easier to work with than PHP / ASP.NET (well for me at least anyway), it has been designed really well, I really like the razor engine and MVC design.

PHP was really easy to pick up and its amazing for text based games. It also gave me good syntax knowledge for C++. It was so so easy to switch over.
[/quote]

I think partly the reason I disliked PHP so much was because I was using Komodo most of the time, which compared to pHpED isnt that great, once I discovered MVC I pretty much abandoned PHP, its still a great language but most certainly isnt for me

[quote name='Alpha_ProgDes' timestamp='1332456156' post='4924455']
I take it when you say ASP.NET, you really mean Webforms.

I maintain that there is no such thing as Webforms. Microsoft never came up with the idea and they don't exist and the world is a better place because of it.

[/quote]

I don't really get the WebForms hate. They abstracted the development process to be similar to the desktop experience. With partial class support, you could abstract your code nicely enough ( not quite as much as MVC but reasonable ). I used WebForms coupled with Telerik radcontrols on a very large project and the experience was extremely good, even based on an n-tier architecture. WebForms allowed me to put nothing but presentation logic in the client and abstracted away me having to deal with irritating HTML.

In some ways, MVC/Razor feels like a step back, I don't want to code HTML frankly, I hate it, and CSS even more.

[quote name='tstrimple' timestamp='1332471233' post='4924504']
[quote name='Alpha_ProgDes' timestamp='1332456156' post='4924455']
I take it when you say ASP.NET, you really mean Webforms.

I maintain that there is no such thing as Webforms. Microsoft never came up with the idea and they don't exist and the world is a better place because of it.

[/quote]

I don't really get the WebForms hate. They abstracted the development process to be similar to the desktop experience. With partial class support, you could abstract your code nicely enough ( not quite as much as MVC but reasonable ). I used WebForms coupled with Telerik radcontrols on a very large project and the experience was extremely good, even based on an n-tier architecture. WebForms allowed me to put nothing but presentation logic in the client and abstracted away me having to deal with irritating HTML.

In some ways, MVC/Razor feels like a step back, I don't want to code HTML frankly, I hate it, and CSS even more.
[/quote]

The webform hate doesn't have much to do with the presentation pattern but with webform being abstracted toward something that doesn't "look like" what really happens. It's not a "N levels up" abstraction but a "N levels up , and also quite a good walk on the side" abstraction presenting things in a totally different and hacky fashion where you feel like a stateless application has state. So while it's possible to do fine things in webforms it's "natural" to do wrong things in webforms like saving a lot of state and storing a lot of it in session / viewstate while nearly none is used. It by defaults kinda suck at efficiency.

Also i don't really get your point about html & css, they apply just the same to webforms as to mvc with razor, webform doesn't provide any css replacement so you're still doing the CSS yourself in both case, and quite often you want to wrap whatever webform /mvc stuff you write in a lot of raw html. They're pretty similar on that.

Personally I would go with HTML, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL These are super standard and will allow you to even use free hosting. A perfect example would be the two sites in my signature.