The book Maya Fundamentals has some (imho) very useful MarkingMenus (=kind of shortcut(s) to various tool(s), you can easily make'em yourself when you need to) and I use these marking menus all the time.

If I were to give some advice to a fellow newbie, it would have to concern with the issue of not "giving up" on figuring out how the tool works. If something doesn't "work" then you have to dig into the manual or simply ask around for adwise.

Hotkeys and marking menus are way useful. After a while you would also (perhaps) want to make some shelf-buttons on your own (transferring menu items to the shalf, and also by customizing buttons)(it is soo easy to do this).

Example:
-A button for setting the pivot point of an object, to the center of the grid (for easy mirroring against an axis)
-A button for doing the mirrroring op. for say, the X axis.

Come to think of it, I guess I could make a single button to do both of the above

Well... this is the only examples I've got to this date.

These were my first concerns, when I first started;
"How the hell do I mirror an object???"
"How does the snap tool work?"
"And what are these nurbs thingies?, I don't get it!"
"I hate the nurbs-cube primitive (always has/always will)"
"oooohh *sigh* that hypershader-network looks totally complex"
"aaaarhg... I used the group tool too much, and now my "outliner" is messed up with lots of unknown nodes"
"aaaaarhg... Why does that object not show up in the renderview?"

But that was just a bit of unpatience of my part. Eventually the questions gets answered.