He doesn't mention emacs-starter-kit, so as a community service, I'm pointing it out. I had used Emacs for a long time, and switching to this made my life much easier. And my customizations still worked fine (although I was able to remove many of them)
https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
WARNING!!! The version in git is for Emacs 24. You will need to actually download the earlier version to use with Emacs 23.