The whole point of a community meetup is that you don't need to know everything already. Come with questions, and people will help you figure it out on the night - that's literally what this is for.
That said, if you've got 30-60 minutes free beforehand and want a head start, here's the path:
Two options, and honestly, the Cloud free trial is the easiest - no installation, works instantly in your browser, gives you the full Pro feature set for 14 days. If you'd rather run it on your own machine long-term for free, the self-hosted Community edition is also free forever, just needs a bit more setup (Docker/npm).
The official n8n tutorial - walks you through creating a workflow that checks NASA's solar flare data on a schedule and sends a report. Takes about 20-30 minutes, and teaches you the core building blocks (triggers, nodes, logic, connecting to an external API) along the way. Bring whatever you build (or get stuck on) to the meetup!
If you catch the bug and want structured courses (with quizzes, badges, and certificates), n8n Academy has free interactive courses - no rush, this is for after the meetup, not before.
For the more advanced folks - a community-curated list of free, ready-to-use n8n workflow templates you can browse, steal ideas from, or bring examples of to show off at the meetup.
→ awesome-n8n-templates (GitHub)
A few terms that'll come up all night, so you're not lost: