Being a rookie last year, and the only programmer on the team, really seemed kind of overwhelming. But just sitting down with the classmate and tinkering with the Default Code really calmed my nerves.
My advice to you would be to load up the default code, run it to the robot, and just drive it for a little while. Try to figure out what does what in the code. Doing this last year really opened up a whole new door for me this year, because I'm
still the only programmer on the team, and am able to do a lot more now because of it.
This page's got a really helpful PDF file about programming in Java:
http://first.wpi.edu/FRC/frcjava.html
And some really good team resources are out there as well, if you're willing to look for them.