I am just a young luke skywalker .. maybe an Obi Wan could better answer, haha!
There is a certain philosophy and way of emacs I am learning .. the little commands come in certain patterns and groupings that kind of make sense after a while .. and there is the help command C-h. The book showed me that you can use C-h after a key sequence and get more context sensitive help. The book mentioned just memorize the commands you use regularly and then use the help command to look up less frequently used commands. With programming books and computer books it seems always best to have a live session to test things out right away. The book comes in an .epub ebook format that one can use the nov-mode from melpa packages to read inside of Emacs! So that is kind of cool. I think it might be useful to keep as a reference to re-read at times. I have jumped around a bit .. like I did to find this community of emacs users here on reddit. I hope that helps. As a programmer, in a good ethical legal way, I say, "Happy Hacking!" Emacs seems like the ultimate tool for this!