In Emacs, press Control-h, let go of Control, and press t. That starts the tutorial, which will probably take about half an hour.
IMHO, the tutorial is useless. It spends too much time on C-p and C-n and not enough time on anything useful.
I recommend reading the Info documentation. It is very well written and very complete. You should also read the Elisp reference manual; having an understanding of the internals is helpful even if you don't intend to program emacs.
I definitely agree about the Info documentation (I forgot to include that), but I think the tutorial is still worth doing: it covers the extreme basics using Emacs's terminology. It's hard to figure out how to do some things in Emacs via the info pages (or apropos, emacswiki, etc.) without knowing that, for example, each pane inside the Emacs window is called a "window" (Emacs calls the main window(s) "frames").
Also, it covers some conceptual things upfront, like how C-f is forward-char but M-f is forward-word, and that M-somekey is often a more abstract version of C-somekey. (Also, how to read the "C-x M-c butterfly" style keyboard shortcuts in the first place.) A lot of the things it covers ("C-x C-s is save") are pretty basic, but it tries to introduce some of Emacs's cultural/design quirks, which are probably what really trip up a lot of people.
IMHO, the tutorial is useless. It spends too much time on C-p and C-n and not enough time on anything useful.
I recommend reading the Info documentation. It is very well written and very complete. You should also read the Elisp reference manual; having an understanding of the internals is helpful even if you don't intend to program emacs.