When it comes to manuals, I’m using version 7 still along with version 8. I wonder if they should have made the documentation a wiki by default, so the community could boost the quality of the documentation.
I bought some tutorials on Carrara. And, I must say it was money well spent. The one from infinite skills isn’t too bad, there was also another from vtc.com that also gave me a booster. Both of those tutorials was well worth my money. After doing those two, I got much more out of Carrara.