You're right, of course, that the weakest edition of Visual Studio is free, but I think it's a mistake to choose that way. If you're serious about programming,

You're right, of course, that the weakest edition of Visual Studio is free, but I think it's a mistake to choose that way. If you're serious about programming, you want the lowest lifetime cost per performance ratio, not the lowest entry cost. Call me cheap, but I think choosing Visual Studio is like training yourself to spend money. I'd stick with Eclipse or Notepad++ or Gedit plus Apache and Django or Rails, or something in that direction. Especially for web development, money doesn't buy you much beyond bandwidth.