Cycles - Pretty Good Renders

Cycles. Capable of ruddy nice renders. A bit slow though...

Samples: 60 (Final) Render time: 1 hour 6 minutes 

Samples: 12 (Draft) Render time: 14 seconds

Other news: I purchased Blender 3D Basics by Gordon C. Fisher (for all the wrong reasons - like buying a self-help guide for something you want to fix with a quick no-hard-work-required solution). By the way, at the time of writing it's being sold at a massive discount on this site -- much cheaper than the Amazon store version that I bought...

The book's good, but I've always struggled to go through lengthy tutorials that don't give me an output that I want to create. My perfect 3D blender book would be full of quick 5-step tutorials like "How to extrude a selection of faces along their normals" or "How to quickly create simple 2d shapes without lots of needless pulling and pushing".