SD Project question on Ethernet with DE2-70

Hello all,

I am new at all of this but plan on buying a DE2-70 board for my senior design project. I want to be able to use this board to read data from two different scales that will be connected using a 5-port 10/100/1000 switch and then into the ethernet of the altera board. I am going to be creating a softcore Nios II processor on the FPGA and write the C code necessary. However I have the option of using either USB connections, RS232 DB9, or the ethernet described above. I would like to learn to use the ethernet and was wondering if anyone has attempted this before and how easy it was to pick up? Or, if you think that I should go with the USB or DB9 connection?

Thanks,

Duffbuster220