I just met my brother's friend who has 15 years experience in web design with his specialty being flash. I asked how he got into and he said he experimented with the program. I'm downloading the program and plan to experiment, not knowing what to expect. Is there anything I should know before I begin experimenting with flash? If it seems like I could progress it, I might offer it as a service on my website. I appreciate all constructive input.
You should know that its a lot of fun, and that you should try to learn how to use actionscript 3.0 from the start. Don't mess with AS 2, most of Flash developers know that. AS3 is the future for Flash (and Flex, but look that up too).
Find some basic tutorials, but in the end you should just get a good book. Books are the best way to learn a larger topic, online tutorials are good for specific tasks. I would try to do a few tutorials just to see how it feels, and then invest in a book.
I love having books as a resource. Is actionscript a particular program or an asset of flash?
Actionscript is the language that flash uses to do all of the fancy stuff. Without it you can't do much. Note: Flash Pro isn't cheap and they only offer a 30 day trial. It costs $699.00 US to buy the full version.
Flash is to Actionscript like HTML is to Javascript (this is not a perfect correlation, but just follow me a little bit).
Flash animates and lays out elements on the page, like HTML puts the content in a meaningful way on the page (with CSS!). Then comes Actionscript to help Flash make more things happen, such as connect to data sources, create conditional statements, etc. Javascript can do that for HTML, but proving the ability to modify the existing page or get more data and so forth.
Like I said, the example isn't perfect but it should give you an idea of how they work.