Yay! G'luck with the app. You'll see it has some elegant sides, but also some very bad ones :P You'll love the viewport navigation tho. Another way to setup UI and shortcuts, maybe more visual : If you can locate the tool you want in one of the top menus, just click that tool while pressing down shift+ctrl+alt (I can never…
For modeling look into a plug-in called Nex. It costs but its worth it, especially if you're coming from 3dsMax, it will have a lot of features you'd miss otherwise. www.highend3d.com is the scriptspot.com of the Maya world.