Of course, if you don't understand something, it is up to you to come to us for help. There isn't as much to say about emacs as there is about Unix. I'll just say that it is the preferred editor of choice for advanced CS classes. Of course, you are allowed to use any editor you want, but most of us labbies are most familiar with emacs. Emacs has evolved a lot since it's beginnings.
Many people say it's a bloated program.
It does too much. Now, though, emacs works fine on modern machines. It is an amazingly configurable program. In fact, you can even read your email or newsgroup postings and more using just emacs. This part of the tutorial will just cover a few basic things.