Newbie here. I have a few questions

I’ve been trying to find a good way to learn Flash for about a year now, but I’m not getting very far. Which is the best version of Flash to use? MX or MX 2004? I have a few books for MX, but I see a lot of tutorials for MX 2004. Can the information about MX also be used in MX 2004? I know that the actionscript is supposed to be a lot different, but I’m talking about the differences in the rest of the program. Are they really that different from each other?