The Tips in detail

 "Use multiple material-libaries."

I often use one libary per scene and have several material depending collections. This makes it much easier to design scenes as mat-libs tend to grow to enormous sizes over the time. Another thing is that using one single mat-lib makes you lazy designing textures and your images tend to look similar over the time.

In response I often happen to find this advise misunderstood - especially from the new 3ds Max user. The libaries that ship with Max are a good start. No need to argue here. In case you mess them up, you can always reinstall them from the CD. That's cool.

But: In case you do so, you loose your custom materials if you saved those within the original libaries. Further, after building many scenes you might recognize that there are certain categories you can distinguish them material-wise, like ie. the mood.

Consider having a libary "stones" holding all your textures for various aspects of stone. This libary has the tendency to grow quite quickly and therefore may become hard to browse: How many kinds of concrete- or granite-materials do you have? How many kinds of cinderblock walls? How do you distinguish the brand new industry-strentgh cinderblocks from that weathered wet dungeonwall?

As long as you only have a few materials of each kind, this is not really a problem. As soon as you have like 10 or 20 different wall materials for each type you can think of, distinguishing them easily becomes a problem, since the intuitive names for materials are spent quickly and "concrete gray 5" or "cinder12" might tell you what they are when you use them intensely, but after some weeks of not using them, do you still know?