Gotta do some googling. There are tons of Maya tutorials, seems like 3ds max takes up the most though.
Maya is a very different animal than blender. To me blender’s keystrokes make it much more powerful and efficient.
I still don’t see what the gui problems are that people have with blender. It seems there is a hump in learning blender, there is a lot to learn, but once you have that down, you fly through modelling, the workflow for rigging is a little slower than modelling, but it needs to be, that way you can ensure you are manipulating the correct vertices with your weights and bones, rigging should inherently be a slower more deliberate process, and then finally animating.
To me, I am able to create meshes more quickly and efficiently in blender, but maya definitely has more menus and tools. Personally I deplore having to click on every darn thing to change things. I think maya to blender would be a much easier transition.
Really you just have to get into it, but with a purpose, that way you can learn something.
learning-maya.com has a great collection of tutorials and should be your first stop for, uh, um, learning maya.
3d totalgo to free stuff and then tutorials. Then you have cgtalk, cgchannel, computerarts.co.uk, cgchar, cgarena, 3dark. You also have awn, animationnation, keith lango, comet-cartoons, etc. The other option and I won’t link them, are ebookspyder, ebooksbay, thepiratebay etc. where you can possibly find some decent 3d books for free, like sybex intro to maya among others, little questionable on the legality though.
I just want to add that these are just my personal opinions from my experience, and I think it’s great to learn all the tools you are able so that you can pick the right one for each job. It’s nice to have a favorite, but really diversity is almost a necessity these days, experience from one gives you better ideas on how you might work with the other.
Good luck with your learning.