Does anyone here know ASP?
A bit...
If so, how did it take you to learn what you know
ASP really isn't a "programming language" in the conventional sense. It's a kind of programming. Active Server Pages. Meaning, basically, programs that produce HTML on the fly for use by web browsers.
What language you use depends on your own preferences and what your server software supports. I don't know what server packages support what, but I'd bet the most common implementation of ASP involves IIS (which comes with NT) and VBScript. IIS also supports JavaScript. Some other servers (and probaby IIS, but I haven't checked) support Perl or standalone EXE's.
For example, Brad Dryer's version of Silicon Investor was written in C++ and compiled into standalone programs. Very good approach, as it's awfully fast, since you can write some really tight code in C++ and using standalone programs gets rid of the huge overhead of the webserver having to interpret/translate every program one line at a time as it's running.
As I said, it's probably most often MSFT's IIS and VBScript and that's it. Definitely the easiest and cheapest approach.
A lot of ASP is just HTML. You can write a pure HTML page and name it with a .ASP extension and IIS handles it just fine.
What "makes it ASP" in the conventional sense is the inclusion of VBScript.
VBScript is just a subset/extension of Visual Basic, which is just a superset of BASIC. Most of us who took any computer classes or just did some programming for fun have learned some BASIC. If not, it's still an easy language to learn. Once you know any language (and therefore understand programming concepts), VBScript (or any other language) is comparatively easy to pick up.
iHub is MSFT's IIS and the source code is a combination of HTML, VBScript, JavaScript and a boatload of T-SQL. That's because at its barest essence it's just a front-end to a SQL database.
In answer to your question "how [long] did it take you to learn...", in my case I was able to start making source code changes the first time I ever looked at ASP because though I didn't (and still really don't) know JavaScript, VBScript and SQL are very familiar to me.
how proficient on ASP are you?
Depends on how you define "proficient in ASP". Like programming as a whole, it's such a huge area that contains many areas of specialization. Personally, I'd call myself very proficient in using VBScript to communicate with a SQL database. I couldn't write a Java applet if my life depended on it.
