Asp

[WrigleyF]

I was thinking about trying ASP because I've heard it's a great way to start generating websites. Has anyone else used it? Were your experiences good or bad?

[nickh]

Skip ASP. It's not a forgiving language, makes it difficult to do many things, and ties you to Windows.

Instead, give Ruby a shot:
About Ruby (http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/about/)
Ruby in Twenty Minutes (http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/quickstart/)
The Pragmatic Bookshelf | Programming Ruby 1.9 (http://pragprog.com/titles/ruby3/programming-ruby-1-9)

Ruby's a very flexible, fully object-oriented language. It can run on any operating system (IE: Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux, etc), it doesn't require you to spend money (IE: Microsoft Visual Studio), and doesn't tie you into any proprietary products (IE: Microsoft Visual Studio).

Also, the amount of help that's available for Ruby is phenomenal. There are ridiculous numbers of tutorials, mailing lists, how-tos, etc. Eg:

Ruby Tutorial - Learn Ruby (http://rubylearning.com/)
Ruby on Rails: Talk | Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk)
Railscasts - Free Ruby on Rails Screencasts (http://railscasts.com/)
#Ruby and #Ruby-Lang on irc.freenode.net
Etc. Search Google for "ruby tutorial (http://www.google.com/search?q=ruby+tutorial)".


In addition to that, there are so many open-source projects written in Ruby that will make your life so much easier. For example, one of the many authentication frameworks is AuthLogic (http://github.com/binarylogic/authlogic), which is dead easy to integrate into Ruby on Rails web applications.

And ActiveRecord (which is built into Ruby on Rails (http://rubyonrails.org/)) makes it unbelievably simple to communicate with a database. For example, say you have a database table for books with these fields:

id
title
isbn
price

This tiny bit of Ruby code is all that you'd need to interact with that table:

class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
end

With that, you can do almost anything with books:

Book.create :name => "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy", :isbn => 12345

b = Book.find_by_name "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy"
b.price = 34.95
b.save

Book.find_by_isbn(12345).delete


Compare that to the standard nightmare of writing SQL queries that most people have to put up with. No thanks! I'll take Ruby.