[ag80]

She mentions specifically the Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl. This tutorial has a section on creating secret tokens within the first three chapters (while leaving in-depth discussion of it for later chapters), and starts discussing concepts like MVC and setting up a development environment in the first chapter.

I'm working through the same tutorial myself, so I see no reason to doubt that it is entirely possible to set up a rails dev environment and get started in a single day.

I would also argue she is in fact disclosing how "someone else" helped her -- "...sites like Stack Overflow, MDN, CSS Tricks, blogs and demos. I also used some great online tutorials". Using these resources is to me no different than having your experienced developer friend sit next to you. Probably better, in some cases.