Anyway, here is the sign up button for the group:
Click to join ruby_programming_group
If you join, create a Yahoo profile name different than the part of your email address that comes before the @ sign in your email address, so no one ever guesses your email address. Also, when you join, you can tell Yahoo right up front how much/little email you want from the group: none (popular choice), only important messages from group leader - me (argh! our rebel base is under attack!), daily digest (seems a bit much), or every single message as it comes (you probably do NOT want to pick this one!).
This is a great era to learn to do some programming. Computers are everywhere. Most families have more than one: parents' computer, students' computers, gaming computer. Plus, everything around you with a power cord in it has a computer in it - except a lamp! Modern cars not only have one computer in them - they have a bunch of computers in them, all networked together.
What I would like to do is each people how to write programs that read and write data from files, do some simple math, maybe some graphics, perhaps write a game - that sort of thing. I have done some teaching of computer language courses before, so it is no big thing to me. I have already created a FAQ, a list of recommended books to read, and next I am going to put together a list of little one-line Ruby programs that do something useful and hopefully are not hard for a beginner to read/understand. Take a glance at the FAQ when you get over there, and see if it appeals to you. The more technical something is, the harder I try to make it seem simple to a reader.
Ruby is a pretty fun language, I have to say. I know around a score of computer languages and I have not had this much fun learning one in about half a decade to a decade.