As a novice of Isabelle you should ignore Proof General altogether. It was important 10-12 years ago, but turned into genuine legacy about 3 years ago, when the first production-ready releases of Isabelle/jEdit (the Prover IDE) appeared.
Note that Isabelle2014 is actually the last Isabelle release, where Proof General can in principle still be used. Support for it has already been removed from the code-base, and there will be no trace of it left in the coming Isabelle2015 release (to appear in Spring 2015).
It means, users insisting in some Emacs-based Isabelle interface cannot get past the state of late summer 2014, unless they implement their own based on Isabelle/PIDE infrastructure.
(I am posting this here with a genuine danger of getting downgraded by adherents of Emacs. I used to be one myself many years ago, but that is long past.)