Question: I am a LaTeX newbie. I am curious to hear your recommendations about the best places to learn it. More precisely, I am going to start writing my doctoral thesis in it. Our school already has a template but I would like to get the basics first before diving into that template. With that, I plan to continue writing my journal articles in LaTeX instead of MS Word (which is, as you may relate, sometimes painfully unfriendly to scholars when it comes to formatting).

Answer: 
Little known fact: arXiv is great for this. Look for papers in your field on arXiv, and instead of downloading the pdf, download the source file (changing the file type if needed, so that it will open). Not only will you learn how to make fancy tables, pictures, etc... --- you will also often get to read all the comments that the authors neglected to remove before submitting their paper.
Check out the IITB LaTeX course at edX