It's really not that hard of a program to learn. You can be doing basic vector editing and motion tweens in a couple of hours. For basic editing head over to
Webmonkey and read through their tutorials.
I started with Flash 3. The way I learned advanced techniques were downloading movies I liked from
Flashkit and breaking them apart to learn how they were made. The program itself isn't hard to learn. What's hard is coding, and learning tricks people use to get certain effects.
Give it a try. You can try it free for a month.