You can check out the backroom here for tuts and the Eovia website has a section on Carrara "Support" that includes a great page of tutorial links. The best piece of advice I can give you is just to play with the program. Don't sweat doing anything "meaningful" (i.e. for a client or job-related) for a few weeks. Just "doodle" with the program. make some simple meshes in the Vertex modeler. Don't start with faces or such. Just get used to the new tool you have now. Before you know it, things that stumped you will make sense. One afternoon, I made dozens of spheres and each one had a different shader that I created by scratch. That's how I "grokked" how the shader tree works. The bench tutorial in the manual for the Spline Modeler is a good one to work through. hth