Please explain asp? asp.net? aspx?

Hi!
I'm new and about asp. Are these all the same species asp? asp.net? aspx? Can you use MS Visual Web Developer to edit a aspx file? Do you know of any good places for a newbie to get started on learning aspx. Any and all advice for a non-techie would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

There are a ton of tutorials online, but I'd recommend starting with these video tutorials to get started from the beginning with the most modern version of ASP, 2.0.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/learning/

thanks! this will be helpful. but do you know if the file types asp, aspx and asp.net are they all the same.

.aspx and ASP.NET are related. ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0 both use the file extension .aspx. It's this extension that tells IIS how it should interpret them.

.asp is the elder ASP 3.0 file extension, which if you're only looking to do minor scripting, might not be a bad place to start with all of this, because it's quite a bit simpler than .NET.

Does this help?

It does. just i have this site that was already developed in aspx need to make few copy changes and I'm sure more later down the road. so was hoping to get a quick jump start. I've started on the video you recommended so that was great find. If u think else please post. thanx!

I'd recommend opening the .aspx page containing the copy you'd like to udpate in Visual Web Developer, Dreamweaver or Notepad, and do a Find for the text you want to replace. You should find it and can easily edit it there. If you don't find it, open up the .aspx.vb file with the same name as the .aspx. It may be that the copy is written to the html dynamically in the codebehind. Unless it's a complex site pulling the copy from .xml files or another datasource, you should have no problem editing the copy this way. If the site is using a database to populate the pages with copy, that may be where the copy to edit is. Lots of options

darn you rock. thanks for the options. will give it a try.

some side notes:
the aspx file might have associated Code Behind file: this is file with the same name,
but different extension which is usually .vb or .cs depending on the language the page
is written in - .vb for Visual Basic .NET and .cs for C# language.
changing the text in the Code Behind file is not enough, after the change you have
to re-compile the whole project and place the new dll file in the bin folder.

Would learning ASP help me with .NET if I wanted to learn down the road. I'm having fun learning ASP currently. I'm also finding tons of ASP books on EBAY for $5.00. Does nobody care about ASP? Trying to figure this all out.

Thanks

I wouldn't say that ASP is a poor choice of language to learn, it's just not the most modern. I still use it for simple scripting on pages needing only basic If/Else statements, such as for displaying different content based on parameters passed to the page or database values, and you can do much more with it, but if you want to accomplish more complex things than this, then why not use a more modern language that has built-in many things that in ASP requires coding lots of lines.

To more directly answer your question, I'd say yes and no. ASP will familiarize you with server-side scripting, so it'll help, but ASP and .NET are different languages, so you probably will need to start from the beginning when starting with .NET.

If you can give me an idea of what you're going to be trying to accomplish I may be able to advise on which language I'd use, if it'd be beneficial to take on .NET or if ASP would suffice...

This is exactly what I wanted to know. I'm doing very basic stuff right now so I will stick with ASP. I'm also new to server side scripting and ASP seems like a nice place to start.

Thanks for your time and your detailed explanation.

ASP is a great place to start...and it is still used. The learning curve for ASP is much easier than ASP.NET. However, you should keep in mind that it is dated technology and is going to be used less and less. If you expect to have an engineering future, you should learn a more modern language like ASP.NET or PHP.

Thanks! I'm learning this on a personal level. A fun baseball site I build. ASP is fine for now. Once I get more comfortable I will try the .NET. Regards.