I bought the program for a student price about 2 weeks ago and I have made some really cool stuff since. The Maya help files are great manuals. I just do a few chapters a day and then apply what i learn to my own projects.

Doing this plus browsing around for tutorials, I have been able to learn a lot fast.


good luck.

I believe many people use 3ds Max for modeling. It is a bit cheaper so maybe there is less of a learning curve (but I don't know). They are both a part of Autodesk now, I guess.