Should I learn classic ASP before ASP.NET?

I wasn't sure which forum to post this on, "Getting Started" or this, so if mods think it's better on another forum, by all means, move it there.

Anyway, my question is should I learn the classic ASP before I learn ASP.NET? I'm just starting with all of this but I keep seeing how some people are stuck in situations where their companies make excuses not to upgrade to ASP.NET. Or sometimes a huge application is already built in ASP and a company would rather hire someone to update their existing ASP app than spend time rewriting it in ASP.NET. I really would like to get started with ASP.NET because so many resources and tutorials on classic ASP are being actively replaced with ASP.NET. And it is obviously a better technology. But then there's that feeling that certain companies are out of date, with their sites running a classic ASP, and they're extremely anal (pardon my language) about taking time to migrate to ASP.NET. Should I bite the bullet and learn ASP "just in case" or skip it and go straight for ASP.NET?

Thanks in advance.Welcome to the ASP.NET Forums, Chicane.

I did indeed move this post to the Getting Started forum. (But good on you for looking at the various forums and attempting to choose the correct one.)

Whether you choose ASP or ASP.NET, you're taking a risk that it will be the "wrong" one for your next job/client.

So, how to minimise that risk?

My personal opinion is that learning ASP.NET would minimise the risk. I believe that an ASP.NET developer would have an easier time maintaining an ASP site, than an ASP developer would have maintaining an ASP.NET.

That is to say, if you learn ASP.NET, I don't think you'd struggle too much if you were suddenly charged with maintaining an ASP site. Sure, there'd be a learning curve, but I believe it would be a much flatter curve than that facing an ASP developer learning ASP.NET.

Another thing which arguably minimises the risk is to learn VB.NET rather than C# as your ASP.NET language. VB.NET is much closer to the VBscript of ASP than is C#. This will again help should you learn ASP.NET, and then find you need to work with ASP.

That's my own opinion. We'll see what others have to say...
I have to agree with SomeNewKid2 on this one.

You just need to be aware of the differences in ADO as "Old" ASP used recordsets and all the associated cursors, lock types etc where as ASP.NET usies ADO.NET and out lovely datasets (infinately better...!!!)

I suppose the only other thing to remeber is that in ASP all variables are variants thus you need to write ASP aware interfaces for any COM/VB components that you may happen to write.

If you already have good Java or Javascript skills you may feel happier with the syntax of C#

Happy learning and may the curve not be too steep

Jeff. :-))
Definately Learn .NET
This is the current technology and should be where you focus.

While there are Classic ASP apps out there that needmaintenance, do you want to be a maintainer or a developer ? Mostnew developement is not going to be occurring in Classic ASP anymore.
Thanks for everyone's replies. It makes sense. I've decided I'll go with .NET right now. :-)

More input is welcome, of course, if someone else wants to contribute.