When I was more of a noobie, I really enjoyed the simple man tutorial. It covers how to extrude faces from a simple cube to create the basis for a body.

The only problem was that Kevin used sub-divs to model it, which is only avaliable in Maya 4.0 Unlimited. I have Maya 4.0 Complete, so I ran into a problem. To get passed this, I figured out a way to simulate sub-divs. This process can be found in the help menu of Polygons>Average Vertices. Hopefully you have a version that has Sub-Divs.

https://www.simplymaya.com/vip.shtml?tut=29