Giving the manual a skim and following the built-in Emacs tutorial (C-h t) are probably good ideas, but not much beyond that - you don't need to learn elisp bef

Giving the manual a skim and following the built-in Emacs tutorial (C-h t) are probably good ideas, but not much beyond that - you don't need to learn elisp before starting to use Emacs. You'll probably learn it well enough after you'll start tweaking your configuration file, and the best environment to do that is actually Emacs itself: the scratch buffer will start out in lisp-interaction mode, which means that you can execute elisp snippets with C-j, and being into Emacs also means that the documentation of the various functions and variables is just a C-h f/C-h v away.