I'm jumping right in, I didn't read every post, so hopefully the discussion is still here :P
I personally went with PHP over ASP because ASP means Windows. I'm a serious Linux user, and oddly enough, my server runs Linux. (Who'd thunk it?)
The thing with Web development, is you're looking at about 5 languages. 2 of them actual programming languages, the other 3 just rules and such you'll need to learn. They are:
- PHP (or ASP)
- JavaScript
And
- SQL
- HTML
- CSS
And you have to have sufficient mastery of all of them to create something decent. I work with a friend of mine, who does the HTML/CSS, while I do PHP/JS/SQL. (I'm also really bad at picking colors. (My favorite is 9ABCDE -- a neutral blue)
I code with just Gedit, somewhat equivalent to Notepad on windows, but its much nicer. It does syntax highlighting, tabs, all I need to code. You'll be surprised how different it is to go from an IDE to just a notepad.
Books? Who needs them :P I'm a learn-by-doing type of guy. I dove head-on into programming, and I learned quicker than when I tried to learn other languages. I know books are good, but wait to you have a grasp on what you are doing.