You'll read complaints about the C manuals but personally I think they're pretty good, especially as a broad overview of what the package can do. There were two books out on Cv1 that are still (mostly) relevant (search on Carrara in the Books section at Amazon). Also consider online training at http://apex.vtc.com/ (there is a course on C that also comes on CD (see the eovia home page for details). There are also several good books out that cover 3d in more general terms and sometimes I've found these books to be the most helpful of all (give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he'll always have food). Adam Watkins is a good author in my opinion. Mark Giambruno's book is great as well, especially if you want to build something for your demo reel (it doesn't specifically cover C but with a little effort I think you can apply much of it to C anyway). Plus you can search this renderosity forum for specific topics (last night I was looking up "glass") and there are also any number of online tutorials from the likes of Litst: http://www.chez.com/litst/ (plus material on eovia's web site) Plus a Carrara CD now on v1.1 that is being sold in the Renderosity marketplace. At one point I upgraded from Inspire to Lightwave partly because there were so many Lightwave books on the market but then I realized that with Lightwave to some extent you need to read all those books before you can do anything. Fortunately C is a bit more approachable than that. C is missing some advanced features compared to the likes of Lightwave and C4D (although it does have a very advanced materials system and in certain areas is even better than some of the higher-end packages) but is a lot of fun to use and can create great looking output. I think that starting with C would be a good choice and later if you outgrow it you can always move on up to one of the big boys (and the good news is that the big boy pricing seems to heading down and the big boy vendors are now making more of an effort to make their packages more accessible). Even if you could justify the purchase price I wouldn't necessarily recommend starting with Lightwave unless you were training for a job at a studio that used Lightwave. I find C4D more approachable than Lightwave but for a newbie I think the Carrara community is probably going to more helpful. You might even be able to start with the Basics version which is very affordable (I haven't tried it so I'm not sure what all has been left out).