Things every newbie should build..

torus 1 prim lamps are fun to make. I made far too many when I was a nubie, 1 prim, wow, that's amazing. All you have to do is start cutting. And at that, you get I think 5 unique surfaces to texture with just 1 prim. All you need is a touch light on/off and you are good to go.

first thing i learned (in someones class) was to make a cute lill bunny

that stupid thing covered A LOT of ground, rezzing, stretching, cutting, hollowing, rotations, textures and colors

The first thing I built was a surfboard. Just a squished and stretched sphere and a cut cube for a fin. I took me hours. Looking back though, it was a really good thing to start with. It was easily achievable, but it taught me to scale, cut and rotate. Being a complex 2 prim link set it taught me to link prims as well. I textured it in leopard skin from the library. It actually looked ok.

I think if I had started with something more complex, like a house or a chair, I would have got frustrated and ended up with something crappy and disappointing.

When I started there weren’t any structured classes around that I was aware of. Myself and a friend from RL started at the same time. We started just creating single prims. Learning to cut, dimple, texture etc each prim. played around with the torus and basically created hundreds of different shapes with a single prim. At the time it was just for fun but I now realise it was extremely helpful in teaching me exactly what a prim could do, what shapes could be achieved. After that we started working on our own projects but regularly got together to build against each other. We would pick up a freebie item in world or get a pic of an object then race to see who could recreate it the fastest. I found building with a friend at the start to be very beneficial as you can share all the little tips and tricks you learn that may otherwise be overlooked for some time.

I made a cube once, ....I've been a shopper ever since.

Seriously, build anything that captures your interest. It's been suggested in this thread that the ivory tower is a great place to start...and it is. Some people do well at self paced learning and others do better in a structured environment with an instructor. Know yourself first and what style of learning you respond better to, from there you can make choices better suited to the path you want to follow. There are always classes posted in the events section inworld and sandboxes are full of people willing to show you a thing or two (provided you can avoid the griefers *grin*).

Many have called the SL tool set simplistic and lacking in features. For it's intended purpose, the toolset is surprisingly easy to use and provides results anyone can be comfortable with. My suggestion...learn the tools in the build applet. If you learn and understand what they do, put them to practise and soon you'll begin to understand the possibilities that each tool provides. Seamless adjoining prims are always everyone's worry, yet so easy to achieve using a simple copy command. Learn what the axis are and how rotation works. Nothing worse than laying down a house or item freeform and then not being able to line anything up with it, yet it's completely avoidable. Learn to link and unlink and to edit linked items.

Coming into SL with a wealth of 3d knowledge and experience, I found myself continually banging my head not being able to do what I wanted to do, simply because I had not taken the time to familiarize myself with the toolset and it's capabilities. I tried all the fancy shmancy prim gizmo doodads that did everything including my laundry and in the end always fell back on just me and the standard toolset. Simple math, ie: if a wheel has 12 spokes how many degrees should each be rotated to achieve full circle coverage, or learning to measure from the middle of a prim and align it to another prim using the X, Y, Z, coordinates. I once showed a person how to use math to align prims and to make stairs...that inspiration was enough to fuel their desire to learn and practise, and sheepishly I admit they build circles around me now.

Learning...there is no shortcut....take all that you've read in this thread with excellent suggestions by your peers...and go out there and stumble like we all did until one day...something goes so right..you do the happy dance for hours.

I'd suggest to simply start with a skybox, or a single-floor ground building for that matter, it's basically the same thing.

1) These only involve "big" cubical prims, of normal sizes (so no 0.01 dented hollowed flattened spheres and such are needed for now)
2) They're easier to align. Though I still I suggest activating the building grid, watch torley's video about snapping stuff to the grid, work out grid settings that are convenient to you, and keep practicing while you build.
3) Normal cubical prims just are easiest to texture, also to work out the difference between standard and planar textures. Learning about the difference between these two will be very important, and you better start here, since they may behave entirely different on other prim shapes, making it a lot harder to work out what these settings actually do
4) The only thing that can be a bit tricky with square prims is cutting them up. Try to use increments of 0.125 here to find where you make 90 degree angle corners with the rest of the prim.
5) Once you're almost done with your build, and got a little bit the hang of aligning prims, you may want to add some details using other types of prims. Cilinders are probably next on the list

The most important things you'll want to learn, in this order is:
1) Aligning & rotating prims. The better you get at aligning prims (use the grid!), the better your build will become. It will have less seams, gaps, protruding edges, etcetera as you learn this.
2) Texturing. When you manage to align textures properly on the seperate prims and faces of prims, things will simply look better. As a hint, textures set to planar are usually easier to align when handling connecting prims of different sizes.
3) All the distortions you can add to prims. Cubes are easiest again: tapering, cutting and hollowing are the ones you'll probably use most anyway.
4) Prim managment. Sometimes you use 2, 3 or even more prims for something where only 1 or 2 suffices. You just have to figure out how to distort the prim properly. This is where cutting, hollowing and rotating becomes really handy.

Yes, one of my big problems is that my attempts to build are always distracted by thoughts of "WHY isn't there an automatic prim aligner in the client? Well, I know C++, I wonder if I could put one in...". (If anyone has tried to build SL from source you probably know that's a road to disaster )