Luckily, I started with Poser, which produced horrid renders, so that I was driven to find a better application.
I got nowhere with Carrara until I tried the "tree with fruits" tutorial at DAZ (written by GKDantas). It was written for C5, but still applies to C6.  It takes you through an entire scene building, using all the features of carrara that are vital, but hidden behind obscure tabs. Once I understood that all the program pieces fit together like a puzzle, I could make use of the Bremmer tutorials to learn the details.
A book of scenes and how to build them would be a good addition to the carrara library.
Hmm..... maybe we could start a scene-building thread here.