If you've been following the Ruby scene for a while you'll have heard of Gregory Brown. He's the author of O'Reilly's Ruby Best Practices, creator of the Prawn PDF library, and the head honcho of the Ruby Mendicant University. He does a lot of community funded Ruby work and his latest attempt to help fund his work is Practicing Ruby, an e-mail newsletter and discussion group dedicated to helping intermediate Rubyists to sharpen their skills.

Each week, Gregory will choose a topic that he thinks trips up intermediate Ruby developers from time to time and dig deep into it by sending background information along with discussion points and questions for readers. A separate mailing list for discussion will be made available. The first topic Greg will be covering is Ruby's method lookup path.

So what's the catch? The subscription is $5 per month, the proceeds of which will enable Gregory to continue work on the Ruby Mendicant University. At least 109 people are confident of Gregory's abilities though - that's how many have signed up as of today. Good luck to Gregory and good luck to you too if you decide to sign up.

Oh, and don't forget Ruby Inside's own Ruby Weekly newsletter (free!), of course. Every Thursday, a single mail with a roundup of the week's top Ruby and Rails news :-)

[suggestion] Interested in learning how to create your own programming language or just how the process works? Check out Marc-André Cournoyer's Create Your Own Programming Language. Even Matz said it's "the book I want to read"!