Newbie Advice (which .NET langauge)

Hi all, I really need some advice.

I was about to embark on an ASP learning curve but am not sure where to start. Is it still worth starting in ASP from scratch or whould it be better to go for ASP.net? I have had little exposure to programming so whould this be a problem?

Also I have been told that C# is the way to go rather than VB.net, any thoughts?

Any advice, book recomendations (beginners) or websites to visit would ge a great help!!

Thanks in advance

In my opinion, ASP 3.0 is definetely easier to learn for someone who is new to programming. ASP .NET is somewhat more complicated, even for trivial tasks.

Unless you planning on making a career out of it, I don't really think it matters which language you learn on. It really depends on what you wish to accomplish. Although I haven't heard any talk of it yet, ASP 3.0 might get phased out as .NET gains more momentum. At least that has been Microsoft's custom in the past.

So, I would reccomend learning on ASP 3.0. It's simple to learn, and once you get down the basics, just move on to .NET. It shouldn't take you that long to grasp, so I wouldn't choose between one or the other, I would just decide to do 3.0 before .NET.

I kind of agree with DeviantScripter on this one. Classic ASP is easier to learn, but it essentially just a scripting language.

The new .NET stuff is 'proper' programming. Esp if you go down the C# route. It's a fully featured OOP language. Even VB.NET is a lot more structured.

As deviantscripter said, it depends on what you wanna end up doing with it. If it for a job/career - learn .NET, if it's just cos you want dynamic content on your site, go vanilla ASP

Deviant & Stumpy are right on both counts: it depends on what your goal is and "classic" ASP is far easier.

IF (big if) your end goal is a career as a programmer, I would recommend C# over VB.NET. I use VB.NET myself, coming from an ASP 3.0 background, and (in my VERY brief career) find every other language I want to use (PHP, Perl, Java, even Javascript!) has a similar syntax (semicolons at the end of lines, curly braces for if statements, parantheses in weird places ) that is nothing like VB/VB.Net/VBScript. I often think it would have been a lot easier for me if I had started with an Object-Oriented language based on that C Syntax!

Everything's easy when u know C