Learning ASP.NET

What's the best book, fastest way to learn?

[ryanmpsb]

Outside of having someone tutor me on ASP.net what is the fastest/best way to learn?

I talked to a guy who has been programing since '79 and he said WROX books were the best.. I really don't know any programming at this point and a very straight forward book would be best, also would it be easiest to learn to program ASP.NET using Visual Basic or C#?

Thanks in advance!

[txbakers]

Well. Wrox books are very good. I prefer online tutorials if I can find them, and I like the ones at www.w3schools.com. they seem to have added quite a bit of asp.net stuff recently.

As for Vb or C#, both are good. VB is a widely used international standard language and very easy to learn.

C# is essentially a rip off of Java, so if you learn this, you also learn a great deal of java at the same time.

Before diving into ASP.NET though, I'd take a look at JSP as well. ASP.NET for all its hype hasn't been widely accepted in the tech world outside of diehard MS fans, and of course it will only run on MicroSoft servers.

Good luck with your learning.

[Xoc]

I'd say start here:

ASP.NET Developer's JumpStart, Paul D. Sherrif & Ken Getz, ISBN: 0672323575

I personally know both of these authors (and co-authored two books with Ken myself) and can say that they won't steer you wrong.

As for C# vs. VB, which do you know already? Do you know any C language (C, C++, Java, JavaScript?)? If so go with C#. If not, try VB.

[ryanmpsb]

What would you say the learning curve is in term of amount of time it would take to go from no knowledge to being able to create a database driven web app for a company needing to keep track of a 10,000+ client base.

[txbakers]

The number of clients is not the issue at all.

Whether it's 1 or 100 or 100,000+, the database can handle it and your web page will have the same number of lines of code.

The learning curve to write a dynamic page is very quick.

It's all in what you can do, there is no magic formula for it.

I wrote a fully dyanmic state-wide event management system in about 72 hours once, with tweaks after that.

[korkus2000]

Another thing that matters is will you be using web matrix or VisualStudio.net. Visual Studio is a dream and you could be up and running pretty quickly with the msdn.microsoft.com site. Web matrix is good but doesn't help anywhere close to as much as visual studio. Of course visual studio is very expensive. If you don't have a business buying it, I would suggest the free web matrix.

Also if you are going to use SQLServer or Access there are plenty of tutorials. If you are using a nonmicrosoft database then there are not as many. If you are planning on using access then the wrox beginning C# with asp.net is excellent. Full of access examples instead of SQLServer.

[NeedScripts]

well just about a month back I discovered www.vtc.com and am a big fan of the site. They have *very* interesting way of teaching and yearly membership is only for US$ 250.00, which gives you access tons of videos. My main purpose for joining VTC was PHP, MySQL & Perl. And it seems like, if I study daily, it might not even take me 30 days - so I would say again - VTC rocks. Check it out.

P.S. If I am corrent, they don't asp.net title out yet, but it is under development, so it might not be very long before it will be available for VTC Students/members.

[duckhunter]

This is an awesome site. Uses Google Search technology against the MSDN site. I can always find answers to .NET questions here: [dotnet247.com ]

The Namespace drilldowns on the right are invaluable.

[ryanmpsb]

Thanks Everybody!

[Chuck_L]

If you decide to go with Wrox, keep in mind that they may not be around to support you:

Tech book publisher to close? [theinquirer.net]

Nonetheless, most of my bookshelf is Read and Yellow :)