1. First Principles of Infrastructure as Code

Before a single command or block of HCL, you need the mental furniture that everything else rests on. This phase builds three foundations: what Infrastructure as Code (IaC) actually changes about the way you work, why teams adopt it despite the learning curve, and the single most important idea in Terraform — that you describe a desired state and let the tool figure out how to get there. Get these right and the later phases stop feeling like memorization.