Also, try Window, Tools....
And activate the 2D/3D pallette. Leave it displayed if necessary, but recalibrate your wrist to avoid hitting the 2D piece of the panel. I wish there were a toggle to suppress the switachability, since i almost never go into pure 2D mode. At least not yet. Explore the Window menu.
Also, make yourself a cheatsheet of shortcuts. I made myself one fro a single sheet of writing paper, folded lengthwise, into about 4 columns. Since shortcuts are only single key capable, you only need one sheet, well, unless you make alternate shortcut options files, something you should not try this early.
Also, depending on what you are modeling, and your eye preferences, check out the Prefs menus and play with aerospace viewing, vs mechanical.
If your modeling work becomes dense with layers, you will want to become good at moving around. Know that you can right click on pallettes and choose to alter their orientation and whether or not they roll up. In Prefs, you can change the autohode/rollup delay and speed.
Also, realllly neat is the ability to hit the U key (if that is the dafault you keep) to unhide hidden layers, presented in a shaded mode. If you want specific items to be unhidden, and their layers are not explicitly turned off, then click on them. But, if you have a dense rat's nest of stuff like i tend to, they roll over the Concept Explorer and right click on a layer that has the stuff you want exposed or brought into view. Also, know that you can use the Selet Menu or pallette to filter the types of items you want exposed. And, if you are not color impaired and do not have to share on projects, make good use of colors to segregate visually dense or overlapping geometry.
If you have geometry that in full zoom or in zoom all is obscured by visible tool pallettes, just draw in some geometry and lock it so that the zoom has a new screen constraint or view limit, helping cut down on scrolling. However, i am feeling that i read somewhere that V8 now recognizes the presence of tool pallets and keeps the zoomed geometry within a virtual boundary according to where and how sized the pallettes are.
My biggest delays with enjoying VC more stem from my 2+years of obsessing over the meshes and over line quality, partly a matter of a program in which i initially create my work, which is not a CAD app, and so has no fine-detail drawing capabilities by hand unless coordinate input boxes are used very precisely and carefully. Now that i finally deemphasized a demand for surfaces that fully match my imported meshes, i am actually making faster progerss than before. And, it is becoming even more fun!
Oh, do know that you should learn the surface extrusuion and solids sweeps tools and how to use direction lines and projection of curves onto a surface or solid. One of my greatest problems was failing to keep notes that that process worked better than trying to trim off grometry at an exact edge. Just make goodnuse of layers so you can hide or turn off layers used for geometry creation control. Depending on your system, it is better to have on display as few lines or curves as possible. Mathematically, VC is awesome, but i find my system is much smoother and faster in response with more surfaces and solids on display than hoardes of curves. And, my system is virtualized win 7, constrained to 3.4 or so GB of RAM on my 8 GB PCLinuxOS based laptop.
I owe Tim a few hundred apologies, maybe a thousand apologies.
ENJOY!
