amazon

Heres a link to Amazon.com, they have many books for Maya. One that was great for beginners was " Game Character Development for Maya" I'm not really into game development, but it was a good beginners book to learn modelling tools as well as beginnings of rigging, texture mapping, and rendering. Best thing was, it starts off assuming you dont know much about Maya, and tells you how to set up your first project, and the tools you are using, and how to use them. Then it starts later trying to see if you can do similar tasks on your own. Most of the books come with a CD ROM, this one did, and in case you get stuck, you can open the authors models in various stages and see whats what, or even use the model itself to keep working ahead. All books tend you leave something out, or get alittle vague here or there, but thats to be expected, since they could have be written on one version of Maya, and yours is a later one. ( it comes with the learning edition of Maya) So, there will be times when you'll have to try to work through it, or like me.. ask many questions here. And, try to look at any and all tuts you can find, I almost find at least one or two things in almost every tutorial that will come in handy. The free tuts here are very cool, and there are many sites with free video tuts as well. Have fun, take your time, and the more you do it, the more you'll learn. Cheers!