1. First Principles of Cloud Computing

Before touching a single Google Cloud service, you need the mental scaffolding that everything else hangs on: what "the cloud" actually is, how Google organizes resources so that a company with ten thousand employees and a company with three can both use the same platform sanely, and how you'll actually reach into that platform to make changes. Skipping this phase is the single biggest reason learners memorize service names without understanding why the exam keeps asking about resource hierarchy and access boundaries in every other domain.