well ii am also a noob. but i can tell you that i use free software for i am broke as a bad joke, i use FlashDev. its really hard to work with but its fun to use to make stupid pic with.
Also Stencyl is really easy to use. you basically have to make your sprit in paint or somthing, and you follow the tutorials and it will explain how the interface works. it is reall simple and you can conver the game to a .Swf ( which is the kind of file that armorgames accepcts) and you can up load it to the website.
there are a bunch of others... but the cost all kinds of money and whatnot