JOINs Or Sub Queries

I recently learnt that there is a different approach to create "Joins" whilst developing an ASP .Net application. Usually i have databases that have relationships (JOINS) created etc so i never did this e.g. if i wanted to retrieve data from another table i would have done something like this:




JOIN - What I use to do....
SELECT Products.ProductID, Products.ProductName, Products.SupplierID, Products.QuantityPerUnit, Products.UnitPrice, Products.UnitsInStock,
Products.UnitsOnOrder, Products.ReorderLevel, Products.Discontinued, Categories.CategoryName, Suppliers.CompanyName,
Products.CategoryID
FROM Products INNER JOIN
Categories ON Products.CategoryID = Categories.CategoryID INNER JOIN
Suppliers ON Products.SupplierID = Suppliers.SupplierID





Today i learnt this:




Sub Query without JOINS
SELECT ProductID, ProductName, SupplierID, CategoryID, QuantityPerUnit, UnitPrice, UnitsInStock, UnitsOnOrder, ReorderLevel, Discontinued,
(SELECT CategoryName
FROM Categories
WHERE (CategoryID = Products.CategoryID)) AS CategoryName,
(SELECT CompanyName
FROM Suppliers
WHERE (SupplierID = Products.SupplierID)) AS SupplierName
FROM Products





The second code (Sub query) seems to be easily readable but fairly difficult to create to a certain degree. So my question is which method should i use for development purposes? Is there any real difference or just ok to use whichever im comfortable with?

Thanks in advance