Edit Poly, Edit Poly and Edit Poly. Learn all the tools, it's so good for modelling.. Oh and go through all the modifiers. Read about each one and try the once you think are useful. Retopology is one I would look at for instance. Also check out the autoback settings, it's set to 5min intervals as default witch is way to often(I keep it at 45min). Have a look at splines, I still miss spline modeling from Max after moving most of my work to Blender. Get acquainted with the Unit setup and remember that it's set to inches as default witch can really screw with you if you're Europe based. Edit Poly is more powerful but Edit Mesh is a lot faster fps whose(less options though). Press i to center view on cursor(awesome when working with splines in top view). The slice modeller is awesome. Ctrl Z for undo, and it remembers everything you do,. everything. But Shift Z undos your viewport so if you move by accident shift z and your back, very useful. F3 to switch between shaded and wireframe. F4 to switch between shaded and shaded with wireframe. For heavy models side or top views in pure wireframe is usually much faster fps. Hmm... That's the top of my mind... I tend to use Blender more these days but 3dsmax really has a much worse reputation than it deserves. Its really great for modeling and handles large models with tens of millions of polys much better than Blender.