Maya: So you bought Maya or are you working with the PLE? Go through the tutorials, find other tutorials online but don't get too bogged down. Find a focus and stick with that for awhile. Look for projects, stuff you can create, things that have beginning and an end. Up the complexity as you see fit. You will not become a Maya generalist lickity-split, so find a spot 1st. I started with Maya 6 after having Lightwave 7.5 for several months. In reality I probably should have just stuck with Lightwave. I was "granted" a Maya license (long story) and when I determined it wasn't going to be perpetual I crammed, bought a couple of books and some of the training DVDs from what was then the Alias/Wavefront website and got all tied up in intricacies, nuances and all sorts of extra crap, like Python, I really didn't need to know about at that point. Big mistake but it taught me to how to slow down.