To begin with, however, you might want to take a look at the ancient
Legacy Tutorials. They were made for XSI 5, so they're quite "old" and they are in written form, but IMHO they're still one of the best entry-level tutorials that take you across the whole application in a few easy lessons.
Because they're so "old" there is one word of warning: some of the stuff behaves slightly differently and some of the stuff mentioned in the tutorials doesn't even exist anymore (the "old" particle system"). To quote myself:
Hirazi Blue wrote:
As far as I can tell only the chapters 10 & 11 on Simulation are truly and utterly obsolete. The old particles do not exist anymore and I guess (but I'm not sure) the Rigid Body Simulation (chapter 12) in XSI 5 still was ODE-based, whereas later version switched to being PhysX based. But you still can work with ODE in Softimage AFAIK, so that shouldn't even be a problem...
There might be some other stuff that has changed/been improved upon, but I think that can be considered "minor". My personal experience is that while stuff changes, most of it has stayed intact, even if newer/better tools have become available additionally...
And you're better off with an old, good tutorial, than no good tutorial at all...
(Quoted from
here)
Rork compiled here in the Tutorials section: