One point any beginner's guide should mention is that the basic Emacs navigation and kill-ring keys are also used in common utilities. The info command is deriv

One point any beginner's guide should mention is that the basic Emacs navigation and kill-ring keys are also used in common utilities. The info command is derived from emacs, but they're also used in Bash and less, and support is fairly common in text editors and IDEs. As a beginner, you'll get used to them much faster if you use them in more places than just your editor. And Mac users should know that Mac OS X has had basic support for Emacs style editing in native controls, inheriting it from NextStep.