Its always hard at first to get a good grasp on any new technology. A novice programmer always wonders that what is the best way to learn. In my case working on a personal project proved to be really good. Offcourse before that you have to read some good books that will give you an introduction to the technology. Apart from reading books asking questions on www.asp.net forms have also helps me alot. People from all over the world answer questions and express their views.
When I started implementing my first project I was doing all sorts of mistakes. These mistakes include:
* Not closing datareaders
* Not handling exceptions
* Not logging exceptions
* Returning large datasets instead of objects
These are just few of my mistakes. As time passed I learned new concepts and adopted new skills.
Some good resources that might help a novice programmer are:
* ASP.NET Unleashed, Second Edition by Stephen Walther
* MCAD/MCSD Training Guide (70-305): Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Visual Basic.NET and Visual Studio.NET by Mike Gunderloy
* Microsoft ASP.NET Coding Strategies with the Microsoft ASP.NET Team by Rob Howard, Matthew Gibbs
After making some personal projects you can also look at the starter kits available at www.Asp.net. Some of the starter kits are really bad implementation like IBuyStore and IBuyPortal. I recommend looking at www.dotnetnuke.com which is pretty cool.
I hope this information will give you some push with .NET technology.
So, how did you started Asp.net?