I played around with Blender when I was in college back in 2012-2013. Cycles render was just introduced back then. Blender and it's community has come a long way since then in this short span of time.
My starting point was http://www.blenderguru.com/ (for general tips and tricks), reading about ray tracing(for understanding why my renders were not up to the mark), anatomy of physical shapes(for sculpting) and watching a lot of behind the scene VFX breakdown videos(to understand their construction). Frankly, my humble computer back then was not capable of running 3DS Max or Maya.
Apart from this, a lot of articles regarding photography helped. A keen attention to detail and huge amounts of patience is required(while watching your renders take hours if you have the wrong graphics card).
BlenderCookie is the best site for newbies imo. I say that as someone with a decade of experience and was around when there were like 10 Blender tutorials. Also I moderate the stackexchange site, feel free to drop by. https://blender.stackexchange.com. See our resource canonical post as well https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/15355/resources-...
My goal is to make characters for games, and I have been watching this video series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFt_AvWsXl0eTHFZ2XPkM... - I recommend the 5 Blender Character Animation videos. Tremendously helpful.
In my opinion the key is, like learning most things, a little bit every day.