Considering a career as a web developer

[Dean C]

This has absolutely nothing to do with money, it's to do with jobs on the real market. PHP/MySQL at enterprise level (forgetting working freelance from home) has hardly any openings, C#/Java and others do Simple as that, and that's why I'm going to start learning a bit of C# and .NET next year.

[Guy G]

Why is PHP isn't suitable for enterprises and ASP \ JSP is?

[Dean C]

They are faster and allow you to do more most of the time. PHP is developed for the web, C# is not. For example I'd be curious to see someone develop something along the lines of GTA using PHP and some other interfaces

[Chris M]

Varying what languages and skills you have to offer will ensure you get a good job - You need to mix and match web languages with some enterprise level languages...

Something like:

PHP, MySQL, CSS, XHTML, JavaScript, Java, JSP, ASP, .NET, C#, MS-SQL, Oracle

Its a good spread of languages and shows you have the ability to adapt to other languages, not just one or two...

This is good, because if a company is looking for an experienced coder with expertise in, lets say VB, and they are going to look at you, even though you have no official experience in these languages, and their first thoughts will be "he shows he can learn other languages" - This will lead to them believing that you can adapt and learn VB in a fairly short period of time, and someone who comes along with only experience in VB may not get the job just because he fits the requirements

Remember - They may be looking for VB right now, but in a few years time they will probably want to broaden their development, and maybe explore ASP or C# or even PHP, and the fact that you have a multi-language base to work from will make you more attractive to them for the future as well as the short-term

Satan

[filburt1]

Originally Posted by Guy G

Why is PHP isn't suitable for enterprises and ASP \ JSP is?

ASP and JSP (Active Server Pages and Java ServerPages) are designed to scale to large-scale purposes. They are also extremely object-oriented and integrate well with other enterprise-level engines like Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. PHP is not designed for these purposes.

I would venture to say that if vB was written in JSP or ASP with a comparably enterprise-leveled database server, you would not be hearing these stories of sites running dozens of servers to run vB. The solution to a problem is rarely to throw more hardware at it.

If I major in Computer Science, what should expect to learn? Java and Perl I know are on the curriculum...any others?

[Dean C]

Most CS courses only teach Java and a bit of assembly (in the UK anyway).

[kobescoresagain]

I am a CS major, I expect ot learn about zilch from my university. They are considered about top 20. I would actually suggest computer technology or a dual major. Because a large amount of universities do not teach you much about any of the commonly used languages, just teach you the languages that are basic. Such as C++. Which is used way to much.

The computer technology courses could help in the skills need for design and build.

[filburt1]

Originally Posted by Danny.VBT

If I major in Computer Science, what should expect to learn? Java and Perl I know are on the curriculum...any others?

You'll probably be taught C, C++, and assembly. They're also finally getting a clue and teaching Java as well. You may learn useless langauges like Lisp and Prolog, too.

[kobescoresagain]

Most universities have finally dropped C. C++ and assembly are still used heavily (unfortunatly) at my university.