Books are better for starting from the bottom, then once you get the basics down, you can move to web tutorials which assume that you know a lot of the basic stuff.
I recommend the Foundation Flash books published by Friends Of Ed, they are very informative and understandable. That’s how I started out
One of the best guides for absolute beginners is probably Lynda.com’s Learning Flash MX title and Learning ActionScript 2.0.
The first one is for people starting out with Flash MX completely from the start. (so mostly non-AS based guides). It gives you a very good overall foundation for working with Flash and AS.
And the second title is really superb, but it’s quite fast to follow along, but it’s done by the writer of the AS Bible: Joey Lott. A real genius and is a really good AS coder.
You know, most tutorials online are written by people that mean well, but often cutting corners and write very sloppy AS code. Not a good way to learn