everything that's wrong with PHP and a suggestion to use Python at the end

I believe that relying on very basic and well-understood technologies at the architectural level forces you to save all your cleverness and new ideas for the actual app, where it can make a difference to users.

I think many developers (myself included) are easily seduced by new technology and are willing to burn a lot of time rigging it together just for the joy of tinkering. So nowadays we see a lot of fairly uninteresting web apps with very technically sweet implementations. In designing Pinboard, I tried to steer clear of this temptation by picking very familiar, vanilla tools wherever possible so I would have no excuse for architectural wank.

The other reason I like the approach is that the tried-and-true stuff is extensively debugged and documented. The chances of you finding a bug in MySQL or PHP as the author of a mid-sized website are microscopic. That's not the case for newer infrastructure like NoSQL or the various web frameworks.

Maybe this works in reverse too....

This course is designed to help PHP developers learn the nuances of building web applications with ASP.NET, without presuming existing knowledge of earlier versions of the technology. Syntax in ASP.NET is compared to its usage in PHP, to guide the developer through similar concepts in ASP.NET.