If you have time, its time to answer a timely question

I just recently decided to get into web-development, I have learnt HTML, and have been know basically everything there is too know about web-development, except what is prolly the largest part. Server Side. I went and asked myself. Well, where do I start with Server-side? PHP, SQL, ASP.NET, PERL etc. I have no clue. So I would like to get a discussion going on the following…

What do you think is the easiest to LEARN?

What do you think is the easiest to Work With?

What are some of the benefits of each Server side language?

What aer some of the downsides?

etc. Questions like that. I have been hearing good things about PHP lately, so I would like to focus more on that, also is there any good starting tutorials for Server-side?