Yes. You want to get vanguard at least up to rank 2 so you can get armor from them. Then when you hit rank 3 you get a comendation. Same for the war cult. If you can get both of those to 3 and some crucible and vanguard marks, you can get a full set of legendary armor. From there you should be able to do the vault of glass on normal. After a few times of that you should get some upgrade mats. Once you hit 30 you can start doing the weekly heroic at the highest level and the nightfalls, once you've got about 12 strange coins you can buy an exotic from xur. And you can start doing crota's end as well. All in all it takes about 3 weeks of time in this game to gear up, due to the reset timers.