Moving very quickly

There's no excuse for poorly taught material. I dispute that it's review since it's marked as "Beginner" and declares 'There are no requirements for this course other than a web browser and willingness to learn.'

Ruby Basics teaches you next to nothing.

So I spent the last few weeks going over Ruby courses from a number of different online learning platforms and was able to come back to this video and understand a lot more of what was going on.

For those who are lost, don't give up! Just go find another resource that might be able to explain these particular lessons a little more clearly. I used CodeAcademy, Tealeaf Academy's Beginning Ruby book and Chris Pine's beginner Ruby book. I worked through all the lessons on those sites and did all the exercises and now understand this video much more.

No one place will be able to teach you all you need to know. Take advantage of all the resources online and do every single exercise and extra credit. Things begin to slowly make sense. Later

Patrick, I agree with your sentiment too. I was surprised to find that defining your own methods was introduced in the first section right after strings and numbers. Defining your own methods is usually introduced after strings, numbers, control flow, and loops and what not.

I've studied Ruby on my own separate from Treehouse so it's no problem for me, but I really wouldn't have been able to understand all that on my own if I were a fresh beginner.

As I've said in another post, Ruby is very Rails-centric, so often times a lot of curriculum breezes through vanilla Ruby and you only learn enough to cobble something together in Rails. I'm not one to support that. I like that Treehouse has built out a separate vanilla Ruby course focused on the language in and of itself, but I think the order of the materials presented needs to be changed.

It really should follow the newly rolled out Python track, which from the surface, seems to give pretty solid treatment of the language just by itself.

If you are on the Ruby Development Track, most of the Ruby Foundations section is actually just review. This explains why Jason appears to leap from very basic concepts to more complicated ones. When designing the curriculum, they most likely assumed that those students who went directly to this section (i.e. non Ruby Development track) have a sufficient programming background to feel comfortable with the speed of the course.

I agree with to OP, the Bank account was pretty steep on the learning curve for me too. Im working on the understanding that I just wont understand at the moment. I'm just trying to keep going and learn what I can and go back and understand more in time. I still don't really understand classes and when to use them.. Keep going and keep up the good progress everyone..

I would add RubyMonk, Learn Ruby The Hard Way and The Pragmatic Studio to the resources listed by Patrick. These will help you a lot as you get deeper into Ruby Foundations.

Unfortunately, I was having the same problem with the Ruby on Rails course and a mod suggested I do this track first. I'm having the same problem here. Jason is going through things step by step, but there's no explanation of syntax OR of over arching concepts. He goes through the how without explaining the why or what he is doing. If this was a cake recipe that I never needed to change or understand in any way it would be perfect. I could just follow the steps and have a cake. Things are being introduced and glossed over without explanation. Please edit these courses... Please.