What do you find difficult silva?

I'm just asking in order to try to sort things out

Tell me about it and I'll give you some idea about things.

ABOUT UNDERSTANDING THE TOOLS;
Well, pressing F1 give you access to the manuals, and although it may not give you those full mammuth articles about all things, it is useful to get to understand the requirements and limitations about the tools. I prefer to use the INDEX to search for terms, which may reward some interesting modeling topics.

Video tutorials are a very useful learning tool I think, as you may learn those small but handy things all along a video.

I have recently started to test my modeling "techniques" before undergoing a major fiddling with a project. Just to test how the tools will work on my model or the idea of making one. You may find it rewarding to discard your initial idea and try to solve a modeling problem with a different "method".

ABOUT SHADOWS
This is always set by each light. And for raytrace shadows, you have to enable it in the render globals (that main rendering menu). I usually enable raytrace shadows, as it is a fast way of getting shadows. This is more time-consuming, but I dont mind.

The shadow mapping gives some different looking shadows. I have little "expertice" in using this kind of shadow casting.

Raytracing is necessary for giving you transparancy!

Shift + Ctrl + MMB klick a tool from the menues to create a shortcut on your "shelf", for your favourite tools.

The spacebar is useful for different things, you can...
1) Change from perspective to orthogonical view in an instant
2) Change the layout
3) Access most (but not all I think, I'm not sure) tools from the main menu.
4) well and some other stuff...

Marking menus are great for easy access to favourite tools. I press Ctrl + x to access a polygon menu, to create a poly-cube really fast. Alt + x to access polygon manipulating tools. These tools comes with the book "Maya Fundamentals 4", but you can easy make your own. SimplyMaya has a free tutorial section in the VIP SECTION, that has a tut on making your own marking menues.

Do you get your snapping tools to work silva?