Well the experience I have had with Maya and Booleans are as follows.
One day I was making a keyboard, and I spent a LOT of time booleaning out the holes for the keys. I had intended to render the scene in Mental Ray, and the newly booleand keyboard was unrenderable in Mental Ray.

On another project, I had a model that was supposed to deform, and it had some holes booleaned into it. As soon as I tried to deform the object it effed itself up hardcore.

Also if you boolean and then decide the edge is too hard or sharp, and you want to say bevel... good luck. You'll have to end up adding the geometry in yourself in most cases.

It often causes things to misbehave, and although I doubt you'll experience any of these problems so early in your Maya career BUT I'd hate for you to think that they are gods greatest gift, and then you get deep into a project and realize that hours upon hours of modeling needs to be redone because the boolean has cause grief.