How NOT to learn OOP

So, it’s Day 3 of the crash course in Flex/ActionScript/OOP.  I’ve just gotten the two books I ordered on Thursday/Friday, and am trying to make head/tails out of the Flex store demo app.  I’m sure it’s written cleanly and beautifully, but trying to make sense out of someone else’s code while simultaneously learning ActionScript 3.0 and how to write code generally is making my head spin.  The closest analogy I can come up with is trying to read a heavily hyperlinked Wikipedia article in a foreign language – by the time I’ve looked up all the words I don’t understand and sort of get an idea of how they’re used, I’ve forgotten what the sentence was about (never mind the references to other articles/files).  This is not the easiest of learning curves.

On the other hand, it is teaching me about what you can do in Flex/AS 3.0, which is something.  I’m also learning a lot about ActionScript 3.0 (p. 317 of the book on ActionScript, not bad for 2.5 days of reading) and a little something about object-oriented programming (p. 42 of the book on OOP, not bad considering I got it three hours ago).

I wish I had a better idea of what exactly I was going to be programming – at the moment I’m sort of floundering randomly around. If anyone has hints on how to learn a language/OOP principles slightly more properly (with the caveat that it needs to be done in 4 days or less), I’m all ears.