Starter kits contain useful Emacs defaults. There are lots of cheat pages, that help to get an overview of the most important commands.

External Links

Emacs Prelude offers very good default settings and is modular. You activate the modules that you use.
Emacs Starter Kit
Spacemacs is aimed at users using modal editing. It makes good use of Evil, the Vim layer. However, users who don't like modal editing can still use Emacs-style key bindings with holy-mode.
Graphene: A set of defaults for Emacs, for refugees from GUI text editors.
Emacs Kicker
kehealy's emacs-starter-kit is aimed at social scientists researching and writing in plain text using some combination of LaTeX, R, ESS, Git, Markdown, and Org-Mode.
emacs-for-social-science is similar in scope with the above, with two differences, according to its author: this is one is smaller and simpler and not focused on Macs.

Starter Kits