The SAE has some on line courses for new CATIA 5 users. Also if you sign up for a course at a local college make sure that it is an "approved" training site. If it is IBM will sell you a full seat for about $300. The software will run for one year on a Windows XP machine. Machine specs should be high, "take a bat out of hell and set fire to its tail" to get decent performance.
Monitor, traditional CRT, 19 inch minimum. I got a lot of ghosting on a desktop LCD, laptop worked fine. If I recall correctly you need to be on a LAN to do the install., no problem for me as I have a wired LAN at home.
My view of CATIA 5 is that it is a lot easier than 4 to use, all your data remains in one file set no more renaming files etc . . . Almost user friendly.
Rgds
Allan