ASP pros and cons

Hello all,

I am doing learning ASP (not ASP.NET) and need some help on reasons for and against why ASP would be the preferred choice.

So far (in a nutshell) I encountered people saying that is is relatively easy to pick up, easy to do session management and cookies. Others say that it is not as code efficient as, for instance, PHP; that is is not free (like linux&apache&php) and is more or less limited to Windows, is not as fast and not as supported by the community.

Anyone has any opinions why or why not pick ASP?

thanks a lot,

a.m.