I would recommend everyone starting with SharePoint to start with the SharePoint 2010 Foundation.
The reason is that speeding up work with SharePoint 2010 is much easier than SharePoint 2007 because of the tool support in Visual Studio 2010.
But before you go into development mode, you should find out what is possible with SharePoint out of the box, and using SharePoint Designer
When you learned SP2010 with tools, you should:
- See what the tools give you and learn how to manage these xml files yourself (possibly using WSPbuilder )
- find out what is not available in WSS 3.0
- find out what's optional in MOSS 2007 and SPS 2010
Knowing .NET, C #, and ASP.NET is essential to give you a good platform for learning SharePoint with other things that are useful, but you can learn them in the following way:
- XML / XSLT
- Powerhell
- SQL Server
- Silverlight
- JavaScript / Ajax / JQuery
- Windows Workflow
- InfoPath
- ...
source share