[jhferris3]

I don't know of any particular "starter kits". Generally speaking, the way I (and most people I know) got started was either by copying a friends .emacs file or just googling for something when you realize you need it. The latest versions of (at least GNU) emacs ship with a lot of language major modes.

If you're on debian/ubuntu, the emacs-goodies-el is a good package to grab, as it has a bunch of useful packages including color-themes.

http://www.emacswiki.org/ tends to be fairly helpful to get started, as is the included manual (although its only ~3.5 years after I started using emacs that I'm starting to abandon the arrow keys in favor of the builtin movement chords)

I think as you use emacs, you realize "I really want feature X", then you google for it and find it exists and you're happier for it. After a while you get more comfortable with your .emacs file you start adding your own keybindings, macros, etc.