Sorry guys, time for another one of my long ones

I just wanted to post something here because I know the feeling you're having.
For multiple apps be a bit careful because learning to navigate the interface itself is probably the most difficult thing to do, it's one of those bumps you have to get over, and imo one of the biggest mistake you can make is start jumping between different apps before you have complete control of all fields in one. So if you've already started with Maya, you should stick with Maya, I made the huge mistake of starting with 3ds max and switching over to Maya before I understood max properly and it really slowed me down.

We've been working on this site for a year now to make the process of actually learning maya easier for people who find us and get over these initial bumps, you can't see it yet though. The new site will hopefully go up next week, one thing we'll launch is something called "Simply Shorts" which will be smaller projects under an hour and similar to the rain, snow and hdr glass we put out a few weeks back where you work on a shorter project and get a nice end result rather than a full ten hour tutorial which is a bit much to stick through for anyone new to maya and it's easy to drop out and give up halfway through.

It's also important to remember that someone who makes a tutorial has spent a lot more time on it than the 7 hours of video you see, I just finished my scene for a tutorial on lighting an exterior and I spent six days on getting just the scene to come out the way I wanted it. And lighting is the field of maya I focus on, so it's not easy for anyone. I think when you see gorgeous images in galleries you rather think that wow I could never do that than that someone put a lot of time and hard work into it.

The thing with Maya is that it does take so long to learn but it tends to go in spikes, you have periods where you feel like you're not getting anywhere followed by periods where you progress really fast so the learning curve is very steep. Also remember that you don't have to start with modeling but you could do something else first if you struggle because modeling is time consuming and with the risk of getting shot as there's a lot of good modelers on this forum I personally find it slightly dull. I've only started to build proper models in the past few months, before that I'd download other peoples (we have a resources section on this site where you can find a lot, other cg sites have them as well) and practice lighting and texturing that way if you'd rather take that route. I think that building a good model is very difficult and require huge efforts whereas if you use someone else's model and shade and light it you'll get good results a lot faster which might inspire you not to give up because you'll see that it's actually possible to make something nice without being a master at everything.

So if you stick with us for a week or two we should have updated training which will make this site so much better for new users. For learning the basics I think books are by far the best, tutorials should be used for workflows and learning techniques you can apply to your own work and get results, not to go through every single node in Maya. I've always liked Sybex, everything they've published that I've read has been great. Introduction to Maya and Mastering Maya are booth really god books to have on the side of tutorials, they contain some good text tuts as well. And remember F1 for the Maya help files, they're so useful if you get stuck on something