Back to school

I feel like at the beginning of school when I always get scared of the amount of material to be covered. At every other sentence I read I go like "should also read about..." The perfect example it's 5 min ago. I was reading a meeting report on the Fedora forum and I decided to attend myself the next meeting as I felt I could help with the issue. So.. where do I register? Turns out it's by IRC... WTF is IRC?!?!?!?! I know YM and probably I could get Skype to work. So... why not making a conference on good'ol YM? Is it really necessary to make everything so hard?! I mean, I understand the ideea (YM being proprietary software and all) but, isn't this a little on the fundamentalist side? We'll ask.
On the Java front... I managed to get some working concept about programming but the effort ahead only now became clearer. There is a basic set of rules and operations. The trouble is that to be efficient you need to know as much classes as possible. It's like learning Chinese writing. After you get used with the brush and ink starts the real thing - learning the 40000 characters.