i dont know if someone else is posted this but this is the tutorial that helped in my first steps to max:

http://www.bakaneko.com/howto/computer/3d/character/page01.html

really useful, includes an intro to beginners, modelling, unwrapping and texturing.

its a character modelling tutorial, it explains step by step, all action you need to perform ,tools(and what they do) are explained.