If I’d like to learn something new, certainly some new technology, I always like to learn by example. Having a goal to create something specific is, for me, much more motivating than leaving through a book one page at a time.
For instance, Timo has a nice example of Papervision 3D and the WOW physics engine. It gives both a very short introduction to Papervision 3D, which is probably the leading 3D engine for Flash, and the WOW engine, a great free ActionScript 3 physics engine that plugs in pretty much any framework available.
There are a few issues with Timo’s code if you download it. For instance, it is missing an important Flash resource. A small movie that has a game timer in there that shows you how well you are doing. I got rid of it and replaced it with a simple texture, so no more game time. There are also a bunch of warning, which I just choose to ignore (turned of AS3 warnings in FlashDevelop’s compiler options).
Apart from that, you’ll also need to download the libraries. To ease your work a little, I’ve done all the hard work for you. I’ve put everything into a FlashDevelop project and got the libraries from their Subversion repositories. So here’s a truly cutting edge workspace to get your started:
Interactive Plane Demo FlashDevelop workspace (about 14MB)