Feels that you had enough of the very fundamentals of Maya and want to start creating something? Let's do it. Let's create a small cube.. And for your delight, the process is extremely easy.

Keep the 'persp' panel in maximised mode in Maya and rotate the scene (panel) so that you can see the planar grid at the center in a good view.

Now click on Create > Polygon Primitives > Cube from the menu. Now, two things might happen. First case, not a thing new got created in the scene, and Maya is waiting for you to define the cube's size. Second case, the cube would have already appeared in your scene, right at the center, if your Maya version is little old one. We will discuss what to do in the first case. If yours is the second case, do nothing. :-), just skip to the next section about modifying the cube size.

The kind of view that you see right now is called 'wireframe' display. The wireframe display shows only the outer hull of the object - just the edges, no faces. The mode in which you see the faces that make up the object is called 'shaded' mode in Maya.

The reason why you see the cube as nothing but green colored edges in Maya is because the shading is not enabled for the persp panel. Here is how to do that.

Within the persp panel in Maya, you can see a menu at the top (Not the main menu bar of Maya). Click on the 'Shading'. In the menu that drops down, you will see that currently 'Wireframe' is active. Select 'Smooth Shade All' . This will enable shading for that panel and will give the cube a whole body in Maya.