I've gotten some work redesigning a site for a company in my area. They want some flash work done to illustrate some experiments they are doing.

I have basically no experience with flash - I've dabbled with Swish, but that consisted of "exploding text effects" and nothing else. Can anyone recommend any good resources for beginners and also, what software I should use? The company has a decent budget for this, so they could purchase software for me. Thanks in advance!

Macromedia Flash MX was just recently released... might want to check that out.

here's a site with tons of Flash resources: http://www.flashkit.com ;)

g'luck!