I'll throw another suggestion out there, however I agree that Chapters 1-8 are probably the best option. Consider picking up a book by Amstrup, McDonald and Manly, "Handbook of Capture-Recapture Analysis", 2005, Princeton University Press. From this text, the following may be enough to get you through a basic analysis,
Chapter 1-2 (35 pages ) Intro to CMR, early closed models
Chapter 3 (20 pages) primarily covers the Jolly-Seber model (the default model in POPAN)
Chapter 9, all sections except 9.6 and 9.8 (~59 pages)
Chapter 10 (7 pages)
That's a total of 121 pages, some of which you'll need to read a few times but still not a major commitment. Note that you'll be introduced to the Peterson-Lincoln abundance and variance estimators in Chapter 2. If you want "rough" estimates for almost no effort, you could consider using these "primitive" estimators. But better yet, see recent developments in this area from Carl Schwarz:
http://www.stat.sfu.ca/~cschwarz/Peters ... /paper.pdf. From Carl and a previous phidot post, "This is a work in progress and could change in the future."
In Chapter 9, you'll find [basic] instructions on how to import data and build, run and interpret model results in MARK. You may discover that the Jolly-Seber (JS) model is more than you need, perhaps you only want/need to estimate abundance and your data meet the assumptions of closed models outlined in Chapter 2? If so, then you may be better off fitting the Huggins-type closed population model (see Chapter 4 and the example in Chapter 9).
I suspect that if you kept the analysis very simple, you could acquire robust estimates of abundance (and other parameters) after a commitment of about 7 days; maybe less depending on your previous modeling experience. After making this effort, perhaps someone close to you can critique your analysis leading to refinements.