In another thread, I just found out that the Discover Meteor tutorial teaches a number of things that will soon be obsolete in Meteor 1.3.
Which tutorial is now recommended for newbies? I don’t mind spending money.
My skill level:
Try this:
However keep in mind, most of the ‘trail blazers’ have moved on to FlowRouter and React as the view layer. I mean, now’s not really a good time to be learning Meteor. It’s a mess. Even the official Meteor guide makes no mention of React/FlowRouter/etc.
Keep that in mind and make peace with the fact that Meteor is in a ‘transitional’ period. Hell ES6 support is being added I think right, @arunoda so that’s yet another moving target. 
This is not true, the guide is opinionated towards flowrouter right now and will in the future transition towards React as well 
Is there a succinct list that details the differences we should expect between 1.2 and 1.3?
Not so much an in-depth migration tutorial-- just a quick high-level overview.
I’m a newbie still learning Meteor (with React). I found as a start the two tutorials at http://meteortips.com/ were excellent. They catapulted my understanding of Meteor. Even though it teaches Blaze, it’s still worth it as a basic Meteor introduction. Right now I’m attempting to re-write the “second Meteor application” as a Meteor-React app.
Hope that helps.
this is a really good intermediate to beginner tutorial:
While I started out with Discover Meteor (which was great at the time) I have to agree with the other posts here – the ecosystem is changing too quickly right now to say that there is a definitive tutorial that will teach you the basics.
I’ve found the recipes and snippets at themeteorchef.com to be helpful. Also, they are all dated. Things from mid-2015 and previous may be good for learning fundamentals or the logic behind how things work, but the syntax, packages, etc. may now be dated. Things from later in 2015 are (more often than not) embracing some of the newer approaches, like React, FlowRouter, etc.
Things like the meteor docs can be invaluable, but without a basic understanding of how Meteor works, they can also be a bit confusing/intimidating.
Hope this helps!
I also stated with Discovery Meteor which was very helpful despite no react or flow router. I then read through Kadira’s intro to Flow router. Next I studied the Facebook react docs. The Thinking in React article is very helpful. I’m using Material UI. Studying the Material UI source code gives excellent insight into how to create react components (not Meteor specific).
I’m half way done with my first large project (Meteor, React, Flow, Material UI). Now I’m reading the Meteor Guide and fixing all the mistakes I made in terms of best practices. The guide is very helpful, but currently is way too light on the react.
There is also a new book by Ken Rogers. I’ve only read the free chapters, but it looks good.