I know there are plenty of Emacs related blogs discussing every single trick (including the easter eggs) so this won't be another. I don't have the skills for that either but I got to know Emacs better recently and decided to share my (hopefully nicely) commented init.el file.
Why? Because it took me some time to find in the Emacs docs what I wanted. A readable, well commented config file would have helped so I'm sharing mine. Hopefully it'll also make it easy for you to just pickup the things you like most. This config surely won't make everyone happy but, given that it's a github gist, you're free to fork it or to add some comments providing feedback/suggestiond. Actually, feedback is very welcomed but please, keep your Lisp easy to read and clean, this is for beginners. Not to mention that I very much care about startup times!