Would it be worth it to start mining bitcoins at this point? My budget for mining hardware is $600. Would there be an ASIC miner that I could buy for this that would return this and also net a decent amount of profit within a month or so? Is it even worth it for beginners without tons of money to invest in it now?
Is it even worth it for beginners without tons of money to invest in
  it now?


Short answer

No.

Longer answer

I spent over $2400 in ASIC mining equipment from butterfly labs. I started out churning an impressive 120GH/s. I've been running 24x7 and am a little over a month in... I've mined ฿0.78 

Last night my rig crashed. When it came back on I was down to 100 GH/s. I can only assume that one of the on board chips failed. There is apparently no recourse to this loss.

Couple things to note... The difficulty rate is increasing exponentially, at the start I was earning ฿0.03 ($33) per day today I'm done to ฿0.02 ($19) for the same rig and the same approximate contribution to the mining pool. In March, the new 600 GH/s miners come out, at the same price range as the rig I'm running now. I expect that my earnings with the current rig will tank, and at that point be less than the electricity I'm burning to stay hashing.

My expectations / hope is to recover the ฿2.5 necessary to break even before the rig's mining rate becomes a negative investment... it's unlikely.

Note that In my recovery cost calculation, I'm considering the 700w of power used to operate the ASIC chips only... my 'computer' is a raspberry pi and has a negligible power consumption rate. 

So to answer your question directly... No, even with a large budget, the hamster wheel will keep you in the roughly same spot. It's likely a better investment to simply buy the btc on speculation through coinbase or mtgox than to waste your time setting up a rig that requires you to be a relatively competent system admin just to get started. What I mean by that, is that I had to 'flash' a unix system onto the pi and download / compile bfg miner just to get started. Additionally it makes ALLOT of noise, and finding a place to keep it from bugging the family was hard (and I have a large 2800 sqft house).