Experienced web developers

Question

I've made it a goal of mine to be able to program with Flex.
There's a little bit of a problem though. While I have a ton of
drive and desire to get this done.................... I have very
little to no experience except for some experience with visual
basic and some earlier experience with FrontPage.
For those of you who haven't clicked away, I realize that I
may be in over my head on this but I'm going to do it one way or
another. But where to start and which path to take to get there is
the hard part to figure out. I would really appreciate it if any of
you could give me some direction that I should take to get to that
goal. Eg. Should I start by reading materials on Flash CS3? Or
Action Script? Or Flex or ............ go back and learn HTML and
XML first?
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks,
Dan

Answer 1

Thanks for the replies and the recommended reading. I should
have given some more detail. I'd like to be able to harness the
ability to make a highly user interactive website.
Eg. Imagine a website for a cardboard box manufacturer that
makes thousands of boxes a day for all different types of
businesses. All of these boxes are custom tailored for the
individual companies. The user/business could go to this box manf.
website and see an assortment of different types of boxes in the
form of 3D renderings (flash) in some basic styles. These
renderings would have dimensions on them such as W x D x H and
there would be variables on the side of the image (in the form of
lets say text boxes or radio buttons) in which you could enter and
therefore alter the configuration or dimensions of the basic box
design. When clicking on a certain variable, the graphic would
highlight the corresponding dimension or feature that is being
affected by the variable and this way the customer would have a
visual of how this box will end up. Ideally, when a dimension is
entered, the graphic would change accordingly. From there the
customer could order, pay for the boxes and get a estimated
delivery date without ever having to speak to a cust. service rep.
I've given myself 1 to maybe 2 years of using all of my time
outside of my 40 hr. work week to be able to do something like
this. I'm willing to deal with length of time and it isn't such an
issue as much as wasting time would be..........if that makes
sense. I guess a better question would be,
a) Is there an easier or better way to accomplish this?
b) From AndyWW's post, it seems as though AS3 is harder to
learn than C#/Java. I'm probably misinterpreting that somehow. So
lets say if you completely forgot everything you know and had to
start fresh with this same goal of ultimately learning Flex, would
you start by building a foundation in C# or Java to then be able to
comprehend and learn AS3? Or jump directly into AS3 since it would
be just as difficult to start learning AS3 as it would be to start
C# or Java?
Thanks again,
Dan