Reddit mentions of Writing GNU Emacs Extensions: Editor Customizations and Creations with Lisp (Nutshell Handbooks)

If you're serious about this, and want to do it right, I'd recommend locating a copy of Writing GNU Emacs Extensions by Bob Glickstein.

While it is a little out of date with respect to recent versions of emacs (some things are easier now, and a few "best practices" have changed), it is still an excellent overview of writing emacs extensions.

I'd be a little cautious about following it's tutorials due to the previously mentioned changes (you will still need to do some additional manual reading), but as far as a starting point and overview of what is involved, I can't think of a better resource.

You can install spacemacs and other custom configs as a way of discovering what's out there and how to do things, and then put the things you like and understand in your own init.el.

This is a good book to get started: Writing GNU Emacs Extensions: Editor Customizations and Creations with Lisp.

Just go slow, try out lots of configs for ideas, build up your customizations over time.

> can someone give me a few suggestions of things to read up on in terms of linux shop debug workflow?

This book shows why some programmers love emacs so much:

http://www.amazon.com/Writing-GNU-Emacs-Extensions-Customizations-ebook/dp/B0043M56SW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1427123072&sr=8-2&keywords=emacs+lisp

The info pages for gdb are good and there's plenty of websites giving short tutorials on how to debug with it.

This book is good for make:
http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Projects-Make-Nutshell-Handbooks/dp/0596006101/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1427123212&sr=8-1&keywords=make+oreilly