A few people in this thread have said to, but do NOT buy Flash. Trust me on this. If you're a programmer, you won't be able to use the IDE - it's just not up to scratch. It's great for doing animation and such, but for structured code writing games more significant than pong, you'll want to use Flex.
The Adobe Flex IDE is pretty cool, however, the new version which I feel is worth getting is still in beta. Flashdevelop is fine for the most part. Flashdevelop + Flex is all you need to create .swf files.
So you recommend I start with FlashDevelop? I'd prefer to develop on Linux though, is there a linux alternative? Maybe Scite + flex like Riffplay mentioned?
Oh, definitely - I'm just saying Flex is the way to go, any editor (that you like) will do. I use Flash Develop but I'm (increasingly) neutral on that. :)
Though you might want to try Adobe's Flex Builder alpha on Linux. The Windows version was rock solid, but apparently the Linux version is further behind (I haven't tried it on Linux). It's based on Eclipse so it's a memory hog (slightly uncomfortable even on my c2d 3.16ghz + 4gb), but the debugger, profiler, visual editing tools etc are top notch.
A few people in this thread have said to, but do NOT buy Flash. Trust me on this. If you're a programmer, you won't be able to use the IDE - it's just not up to scratch. It's great for doing animation and such, but for structured code writing games more significant than pong, you'll want to use Flex.
The Adobe Flex IDE is pretty cool, however, the new version which I feel is worth getting is still in beta. Flashdevelop is fine for the most part. Flashdevelop + Flex is all you need to create .swf files.