Hi guys, long time lurker, first time poster.

As a Ruby newbie I'd like to give a big thumbs up to the "study group"
idea, especially if a group of newbies got together to actually work
on some sort of project. Personally, while 1:1 attention can be great,
I find working in a group to be one of the best learning methods
around. Mix a group into a real-world project and I'm willing to bet
you're going to have a lot of newbies (including myself) hooked.

I think this idea would be especially beneficial to people like myself
who are interested in starting to contribute to existing open source
projects, but find themselves slightly overwhelmed, and unsure as to
where to start. I know that I've been looking for some kind of project
that I can start contributing to, not only to help make some
contributions to the community, but also to learn more about
developing code in such a large, distributed environment.

Just my $0.02

- Matt