Good article. I found while doing the same thing a lot of the information online was out of date (for example referencing geth's built-in solc) and unusable.

One addition--Geth 1.6 released a very nice interactive tool called puppeth that creates genesis blocks and provisions testnets, I've found it easier than doing everything myself.

Although once again there really wasn't any tutorial or documentation about puppeth for Ethereum beginners, the only reference I could find was a Taiwanese Ethereum meetup blogpost, which was mostly in Chinese.