The point of the first week

I had a student approach me and raise this concern:

Q: Seeing as I'm new to this, I'm definitely going at a slower pace and having to re-read things. Should I stop re-reading and just move on? I guess I just don't see how I could really grasp anything if i'm going through it very quickly, or "too quickly".

A: The goal is not to have everything click. It's like a first pass algorithm on sorting, and you progressively fit all of the missing pieces in as you read. Expecting everything to click would be counterproductive because you actually won't use everything you learn.

You just want to build up some basic pattern recognition, became familiar and comfortable with Ruby, and reduce the fear/anxiety that you'd otherwise get stuck on if you just went into building rails apps.

You will always feel like you don't fully understand stuff, especially when you start. It's very tempting to stop and spend lots of time on one thing, but you can drill down infinitely on any given topic. You could spend an entire 10 weeks on unit testing, but we just go over it so that if you need to learn it in the future, you have some baseline knowledge.

You have roughly 2,000 pages to read in your first two weeks. Get through it, don't get hung up on any individual thing. Highlight the parts that don't make sense, and then ask your mentor to explain them (or ask your fellow students).