[Sussex] Flash development

[James Smith]

Hi all,

Righto, here goes. I'm an experienced coder, but I've never done any
flash, so I'm only just starting out and trying to work out what I can
do and what I need in order to do it. Bear with me :)

1) I need to create a "graph viewer" which can display a set of data
which is fetched via an HTTP request from a web server. Can you do
HTTP requests for such remote data within the Flash file?

2) Does Flash have the sort of capabilities I need to do a bit of
analysis on this data (just some simple maths and array manipulation
really)? This would be very useful as it would reduce load on the
server, which wouldn't have to do the actual data analysis.

3) Are there open source compilers/tools, and if so, what would you
recommend? Ideally I don't want to shell out for the Adobe Flash dev
environment thing if I don't need to.

4) This is my main problem really - are there any basic introductions
to developing Flash which anyone can recommend? I've looked around,
but not managed to find anything which makes it particularly easy to
get into... otherwise, are there any books you'd recommend?

cheers,
James