One way to learn Emacs is to study other people's .emacs files. The stuffs there usually address real world problems people facing. I always learn something new when looking at other .emacs files.

He doesn't mention emacs-starter-kit, so as a community service, I'm pointing it out. I had used Emacs for a long time, and switching to this made my life much easier. And my customizations still worked fine (although I was able to remove many of them)

https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit

WARNING!!! The version in git is for Emacs 24. You will need to actually download the earlier version to use with Emacs 23.

Much of the stuff in the starter kit (but not all of it) is actually in emacs24. Phil has been influential in making this happen, I think.

I too got started using emacs with technomancy's starter kit.

BTW I am not a fan of js2 mode based on my initial use of it, but perhaps I'll try the tweaks.

Does hippie-expand have any real advantages over autocomplete-mode?

Site's down

It seems to be up now, but maybe a bit slow?

In Emacs you often need to make Lisp macros for customizations. I love Emacs and have been using it daily for the last few years, but it's not newbie friendly. Making small tweaks can require extensive Google searching.