Lucas, I just started working with Maya myself. I have some experience with 3ds Max so I kinda knew what I had to learn first and what to hold for later.
I started with the tutorials from Maya (under Instant maya > Tutorials in the help files)
Then I started reading 'essentials' and 'polygonal modeling' (Using Maya) and am still reading them. After that I'll move on to: subdivisions, NURBS, texturing, animation, rendering...
They tend to get boring after a few hours of reading, so try out some things they explain or just look them up in the program.
I suggest you visit some tutorial sites, then pick out some easy ones and try them.
Make sure you watch the movies on this site and digital-tutors. They're really great to learn from.
I bought the 'maya 4.5 savvy' book, wich I'm expecting to arrive in about a week. I'll post a msg on this forum to give you all my impressions of it.

also these sites have some nice forums:
www.cgtalk.com
www.highend3d.com
www.3dbuzz.com
and ofcourse this one

that should do it