I just wanted to offer some positive feedback on the tutorial, which I used six years ago to get acquainted with Emacs 20.7. I had been a long-time user of Brief on MS-DOS. But it didn't work well under WinNT, and the other editors I tried and actually paid for (Zeus and Vedit) didn't meet all my needs.
The online documentation was very important. Without it, I wouldn't have known that Emacs was worth evaluating in the first place. Then after I installed Emacs, the tutorial got me using Emacs very quickly. I took its advice and learned the native Emacs keybindings rather than install the Windows emulation modes. (I did try Crisp-mode briefly but didn't like it.) And I think that the tutorial introduced Info manual reader. But the new terminology (especially fill vs. wrap) confused me, and I relied heavily on the WinNT FAQ. Then I found, printed and read the entire Introduction to Emacs Lisp, mostly while waiting for the effects of my weekly allergy shots to wear off. But the very best source of knowledge came from diligently reading the gnu.emacs.help Usenet group (using Gnus, actually.) The reason it was so helpful was that it provided help for the things that new users commonly have trouble with. It served as a sort of "Tip of the Day" feature. One of the best of these was M-x apropos (as opposed to C-h a). (Actually, if you search gnu.emacs.gnus for "Tip of the Day," you might find threads that I participated in.) Sorry for the long post, but I didn't have time to write a shorter one (to paraphrase Mark Twain).
