Many years ago I started writing
https://github.com/NWChem/NWChem101. I never finished it, but it still contains some useful stuff. The content on geometries and basis sets is probably useful. If you have a specific question that might be answerable in that tutorial, file a GitHub issue there and I'll try to write something.
You can also use
https://github.com/NWChem/input-generator, which I created because I am too lazy to write NWChem input files by hand. If you are the type of person who learns by example, those might help you. They contain the settings I use in my work, which are designed to be some approximation of optimal from a computational perspective.
I only know about atomic orbital basis set methods in a vacuum.
Jeff