Resources for an old newbie ?

[Frederick Bartlett]

I’ve been using Emacs for nearly 30 years, but I was never taught it and
did not take computer science classes (unless you count Fortran).

FWIW, my main OS is Fedora Linux, though my company insists that everyone
have Windows, so I also use WSL.

So I can use it as a text editor proficiently enough, but am quite ignorant
of Emacs Lisp (and all other Lisps), though I have written the odd macro
here and there.

Is there an easy way to learn how to use all the resources in the Emacs
ecosystem without becoming an expert Lisper?

E.g., I just tried to install helm and am completely baffled by the info
and error messages I’m getting:

INFO:  Loading /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/site-start.d/lilypond-init.el
(source)...

While I do occasionally edit lilypond files in Emacs, I was not aware that
I had integrated it into Emacs (I mostly use Frescobaldi), and lilypond is
not in my init.el file.

ERROR: find: ‘./emacs/helm’: No such file or directory

Since I invoked
  ./emacs/helm/emacs-helm.sh -P /usr/bin/emacs-28.2
from my home directory, I would expect it to know where it is.

There must be some extremely basic knowledge that I have completely missed
… any pointers?

Thanks!
Fred