The GP is right to be offended by what you said, because his way of learning Emacs was an extremely typical one for decades. Remember that such informative and inspirational resources like Mastering Emacs didn't exist until the 2010s. I myself got into Emacs around the turn of the millennium because I wanted a free IDE for my programming-language classes at uni, and also I wanted to use Gnus which was such a capable mail and Usenet reader. It was only over years, as I amassed various problems that I needed to solve and tasks to automate, that I began learning all the tricks of Emacs customization and then eventually Emacs Lisp itself.
You got the ELisp intro right in the help section since forever.
Of course, but not everyone has a reason to look at it in the beginning. As I said, I only became interested in hacking Elisp once I had been using Emacs for a long while (years) and eventually ran into cases where I wanted to change default behaviour. Meanwhile, all my hacking energy was going to other languages for which I just used Emacs as the IDE with the supplied major modes.
Ah, when I was a teen I always wanted to read everything as I had no internet at home and often you founds manuals, gems such as great programming and Math books and whatnot.