Reddit mentions of Pro ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework (Expert's Voice in .NET)

These are the top 3 I'd say:

• Professional ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework (Wrox-August 2011)
  > Jon Galloway, Phil Haack, Brad Wilson, K. Scott Allen
  
  
• Pro ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework (Apress-June 2011) - [Pre-order v4]
  > Steven Sanderson, Adam Freeman
  
  
• ASP.NET MVC 4 In Action (Manning-June 2012)
  > Jeffrey Palermo, Jimmy Bogard, Eric Hexter, Matthew Hinze, Jeremy Skinner
  
  Don't get hung up over V3/V4; there's not a lot new in 4.
  
  Also don't worry about being "up to date", most of your time will be spent trying to figure out the best way to do something; the "how" to do something part is usually very straight-forward, there are just many options.

You sound exactly like me 10 months ago. I also took the plunge, moving from PHP/MySQL to C#/.NET. Keep in mind that I am not a .NET veteran, but I have gone from knowing nothing to developing all of my sites in it in just under 10 months.

• Object Oriented is a big part of it. If you know this from Java, great. If not, start there. I recommend Head First Object-Oriented Analysis & Design
  
  
• MVC - if you have used a PHP MVC framework you are going to have a much easier time of it. I did not, so I had to learn MVC, OOP, C#, and .NET all at once.
  
  
• Wrox ASP.NET MVC3 has been invaluable. My copy is covered in sticky notes and highlighter after reading, and I refer to it heavily.
  
  
• I just bought Pro ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework, and it also seems good, however, I like the Wrox book better.
  
  
• Pluralsight.com - A little pricey at $30 / mo, but they have a plethora of extremely high quality videos. If you have enough free time to make use of the monthly subscription, I do recommend it.
  
  
• When you come to databases, I highly recommend going the Entity Framework route. Most other things seem like garbage by comparison in my limited experience.

If you want to minimize your work and just want it running on the new platform, rather than doing a full rewrite:

Use MVC, which is a lot more like classic ASP. Don't use Razor, the new view engine...go with the old one, which uses the same tags as classic asp.

The main difference is that MVC has a "controller" for each page where you can put business logic, populate variables that will display on the page, etc. That way you don't have so much logic mixed in with your html. But it's still possible to have logic in the view, and you can leave it there initially then move it to the controller gradually. You will need to convert your vbscript to a .net language...I prefer c# but vb.net might be an easier conversion.

Data access can work pretty much like you have now...the basic .net stuff isn't that much different. If you're calling stored procedures, just keep them, maybe write a simple wrapper around the data access stuff to abstract away the boilerplate. If the old code builds sql by mashing strings together, make sure you use actual sql parameters, so you're not vulnerable to sql injection attacks.

If on the other hand you're up for a full rewrite and updating the UI to current standards...still use MVC, replace the frames with ajax, and take a look at knockout.js, jquery, and jqueryUI. You'll end up with a much nicer site.

The best MVC book is probably Sanderson's.