Assembly is good for some things, not others. If you need to provide maximum performance for a particular device (for example, max throughput for an A to D converter to a storage device for collecting data in a laboratory setting or writing an especially high performance device driver), it's pretty hard to beat the native assembly language.

If your boss wants a complete program tomorrow (or even next week), assembly is probably not in the cards. Also, as already noted here, the form and syntax of assembly language depends on the hardware used, so it is not very portable except as an experience base you carry in your head.

However, if you have a lot of time to spend and a lot of curiosity about exactly how your hardware and operating system work, assembly language programming is probably the best teacher (in the same sense that a Marine drill instructor is your best teacher.) You will learn, you will learn a lot, but you will pay a high price.

Unfortunately, I am only one generation of programmers beyond the one that though assembly language compilers were a great advance. Those boys wrote programs using binary machine language, often put in a word or byte at a time through front panel swithes. For my sins, I once had to write and input a bootstrap loader that way, and I would really hate to do anything more complicated than that!!

These days, I believe VB is best for quickly writing an impressive looking program (that generally depends on the current speed and capacity of PCs to disguise the inefficiency) and C++ is the best for real professional jobs. Either of these would be a better first language, with VB providing almost immediate gratification and C++ being the language that one probably should aim for eventually.