Just my two pence, coming from a background where you have to also learn a very large rule book in a safety critical environment, pre-reading can be detrimental to your learning as you may interpret and learn things incorrectly to begin with. Courses like this are usually designed to teach people everything in a structured manner, for which you need no prior knowledge. Pre-reading of times and regs, in my opinion, should only be done if the course dictates it. However reading up on a general level of how things work probably wouldn’t be a bad idea?
Each to their own!