After a full semester of using Adobe Illustrator, I have come to really appreciate wide range of abilities and tools the program has to offer, and that's only in the limited context of beginner map making!
My favorite tool so far is the scale tool. This is certainly not unfamiliar to most students in our class, but I have found it invaluable. The most helpful application of the scale tool for me was to make my maps the optimal size for posting on my blog. At the beginning of the semester, I was having problems with the size of my map posts; mainly that they were too small to be able to see the details and smaller texts that were easily visible on Illustrator or in printed version. I found that once I was finished with a map, I could use the ctrl+a command to select everything and scale it by right clicking and selecting transform > scale and adjusting the percentage to make it all larger but still proportional, and the exported jpeg that I posted on my blog was nice and large enough to show all the details I worked to perfect.
Another tool that I found useful was the grouping tool. You can select multiple items by holding shift while clicking them to select. Once they are all selected you right click them and select "group" to group them together. Once items are grouped, you can click on one of them and they will all be selected, and you can move them together as they stay locked in their relative positions to one another. You can also scale them, change color, and do a number of other effects on them while they keep their form. I found this especially helpful for legends that I made and took the time to make sure were perfectly aligned. Once you have achieved the effect you want, or you want to change something within the grouping, you can right click again and select "ungroup" to undo the grouping feature.
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