The GNU manuals are extremely comprehensive... far too comprehensive to read as an introductory text. The Emacs manual's table of contents alone is over 6000 words[1].
I recommend my own guide http://david.rothlis.net/emacs/howtolearn.html which teaches you how to use the Emacs built-in help, the elisp source code, and the built-in access to these very manuals.
[1]
lynx --dump http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/ind... |
sed '/^References/,$ d' | wc -w
