About ASP.Net
There are different resources depending on your interests. ASP.Net is the sibling of PHP, ColdFusion, JSP and other server-side languages.
ASP.Net is developed to be used as a
Rapid application development platform, in that it together with Visual Studio often is able to get you up and running very quickly.
ASP.Net gives you:
- Localization
- Master pages (like templates in php)
- User authentication (verifying visitors) and authorization (verifying that they are authorized to request resources).
- A choice - either develop you app quickly with drag-and-drop from the toolbox, or go learn the more advanced stuff (see below) that lets you port applications to linux and integrate them with enterprise systems.
- AJAX-support (AJAX.Net)
- the possibility to use numerous frameworks that extends the already very large .Net framework.
- support to load external datasources asynchronously, as opposed to e.g. PHP which doesn't have that support.
- a page model where you don't always have to write $_GET['lalala'], but rather controlname.Text.
www.asp.net <-
go here if you'd like to learn ASP.Net.
ASP.Net is a framework that lets you learn as you go - you can get your first hello-world application up and running in a few minutes, and most common stuff can be accomplished using the built-in features, but you can excel as far as you want, learning more and more of the programming language of your choice (most often c#).
This opens up a world of
design patterns and
application architecture much entangled with the world of Java which has had and has its widest adoption in an academic context.
Other good resources:
http://www.aspnetresources.com/default.aspx (intermediate) -- ASP.Net with web standards
http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/FlashUpload.asp -- a cool tutorial
http://www.asp.net/cssadapters/ (intermediate) -- gives built-in controls better XHTML output
http://www.mysql.com/products/connector/net/ -- use your already-present MySQL database with ASP.Net.
http://www.hibernate.org/343.html (advanced) -- lets you work with objects directly and lets you focus on your objects and your functionality instead of the sql statements.
http://www.cuyahoga-project.org/home.aspx - open source CMS using NHibernate (which means support for a wide array of databases).
http://castleproject.org/ - useful resources for advanced applications. However, if you're a beginner and you find the ASP.Net syntax (1) hard to learn, go with MonoRail instead. This project combines the web syntax of Ruby-on-Rails with the great (as in big) .Net Framework as the back-end and easily integrates with e.g. NHibernate and unit testing because it demands a Model-Controller-View separation of concerns.
I'll add resources upon request
. Good luck!