I'm about to start on a Sitecore project in 6-8 weeks time. I have extensive ASP.NET MVC experience (4 years) and know the ins-and-outs of web development fairly well.

I am scheduled for official Sitecore developer training in 4 weeks. I would like to prepare myself further by learning as much as I can from online, freely available resources.

I am aware of the extensive blogging community that exists, but most of these blogs are focused at developers with some level of expertise. At this point I am more after resources that focus on learning and training from ground up.

Where can I go to find information like this? Any community resources? E-books? Webinars? Youtube tutorials?

Also; if anyone can recommend any books I can buy, that would be much appreciated as well.