Learning Resources

Emacs Tutorial - Beginners Mandatory

Emacs ships with a tutorial. Just type `C-h t`. It teaches you all the essentials you need to know for starting emacs.

Books

Learning GNU Emacs, 2nd Edition by Debra Cameron, Bill Rosenblatt, Eric S. Raymond

Much better than the current, 3rd edition. The first half of the book walks you through the fundamental steps, as a tutorial.

Can be obtained from O'Reilly http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565921528.do

Tutorials

Xah Emacs Lisp Tutorial - This concise and concrete tutorial focus on practical needs with examples.

Xah Emacs Tutorial

Screencasts

Blogs

Emacs Fu - Useful Tricks for Emacs
Mastering Emacs
Got Emacs?
Xah Emacs Blog - Tips and tricks for emacs and emacs lisp

Planet Emacsen - blogroll, includes probably all above

Useful Extensions

Before you install a lot of extensions, explore your Emacs distribution! Try 'C-h p' (find-emacs-packages) to browse the available packages by category.

Configuring Emacs

This blog post is a great introduction to setting up your .emacs and emacs dir the "professional way"!