Note that both apt-get and aptitude, together with dpkg, are part of APT (advanced packaging tool), which is the suite of tools handling .deb packages.

While I'm at it, neither apt-get nor aptitude are simply front ends to dpkg - both have fairly complex (and different) policies for how to handle dependency conflicts, etc, while dpkg makes you do everything by yourself.

See http://superuser.com/questions/93437/aptitude-vs-apt-get-whi...