I just recently started using emacs, I've been hearing a lot about helm all over the place, are there any resources out there the folks here prefer that I can read up to learn why helm would be useful?

@verma: this seems to be the canonical tutorial http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html

but imo it's a bit overwhelming

It's good that you're just starting out, because helm behaves differently from ido etc.

for now you should probably copy some minimal config, and just get used to helm-mini, helm-recentf and helm-find-files, these are the 3 I use the most

Thanks @jethroksy I'll give it a shot!

elpa is down 😞

Someone knows ETA it's working?