Re: my introduction
Get out, look and listen. Get a couple of bird guides, Sibleys is one of the most popular, you can find a review somewhere on this site. There are quite a few Texans that post here and I am sure they will chime in to tell you good places to go locally. (although Texas is quite a bit bigger than Rhode Island, so local is different there than it is here! ) I like photographing the birds and am lucky to have gotten quite a few really good shots, in my opinion, since I started in November 2009. (some of the pics were from before I really started birding.) If you can take pictures this is a great place to post them for identification or just for sharing.
Good luck and let us know how it is going.