I'm coming from a cinema 4d background (2 years), and the 3d buzz tutorials are great, I have the magic of houdini (I like it alot but it's just a lil too “bookish” for me… if that makes any sense, but Cunninghams occasional subtle jokes are quite funny). I also have the gnomon training dvd, I like it alot, unfortunetly I had some problems in the seventh lecture and it took gnomon pretty long to get me a response but when he started answerring me we actualy sent a few emails to each other so i guess he was really busy. But the best tutorials for me were the ones hosted on
http://sidefx.vislab.usyd.edu.au/houdini_video/by_topic/compositing/index.html [sidefx.vislab.usyd.edu.au] but that link has been down for some time now.