PHP or Coldfusion?

New to web development

[jmoreira]

Quick question! I'm learning web development and I big question mark popped out. I've heard a lot about PHP, and honeslty i think most people prefer PHP over any other development language. However, as newbie what you would recommend to learn first, PHP or Coldfusion? If you could explain the goods and bads would be awesome. I understand this is a PHP forum but i'm sure some of you have heard or used Coldfusion, so I figure, Why not ask? Thanks!

[inbound]

Although there are companies out there that utilise ColdFusion I'd say that PHP is by far the best choice of the two if you want to learn something that is useful to yourself AND marketable to others.

PHP is fairly easy to learn if you put the time in and allows very rapid development due to the amount of scripts and information available at no cost.

I just checked a popular programming resources website and can report that they have around 50 times as many resources for PHP. I've often needed to do some 'quick and dirty programming' for internal data and found a couple of PHP scripts that could be butchered easily to fit the requirements.

When it comes to the cost of implementing either technology, PHP wins hands down. It's free, it works perfectly with Apache, Linux and MySQL - so much so that there is an abbreviation (LAMP) for the combination of Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP.

I've no doubt that ColdFusion is a good solution in certain circumstances but if you are new to development you probably won't be in that bracket.

PHP has one other massive benefit, the people who use it. There are more PHP users than ColdFusion, they are more likely to be willing to help you with an issue (as long as you don't expect people to fix things that you have not looked into at all) and PHP users have worked on every concievable issue in regards to web development.

So, if you haven't guessed, my vote is for learning PHP.

[jatar_k]

all good points inbound

learning php will also give you more options in regards to moving into other languages in the future. It will also give you a better understanding of filesystems, operating systems and servers than coldfusion ever would.

[henry0]

A little add on
LAMP: the P stands for PERL, PHP and/or PYTHON
not only limited to PHP, although we mostly when conversing about Apache and Linux take for granted that P=PHP.
PERL is also present in most LAMP

[jmoreira]

So you think that even if I have no previous programming skills at all, I'm better off learning PHP as opposed to Coldsufion? I guess I will do it. Thanks a lot for you input.

[henry0]

Even better; to train and setup a script test bed
install:
Check our Library Thread [webmasterworld.com]