Thanks John for your videos. it's been very helpful to me as a beginner. Most of my questions were answered. I also read one on http://practicalli.github.io. I learned by reading first then watching the videos. Now I think I am ready to learn spacemacs 😄. I use vim at work but just the basics.
Hope you find the Spacemacs book useful. I am also trying out NeoVim and I quite like that for smaller editing tasks (I still have a lot to learn). I am also trying out Conjure, a vim plugin for Clojure development.