Is there a better way?

Hello,
I am muddling through rules with hard earned success overall. My latest rule is one that updates family member’s cellphone’s LastUpdate item, a DateTime type, at each state change. I couldn’t find an example of how to write it in one rule so I wrote 4 rules, 1 for each phone:

rule "Update User1 Last-Seen Time"

when 
    Item Presence_Mobile_User1 changed
then
    User1_LastUpdate.postUpdate(new DateTimeType())
end 

Is there a way to write a single rule that will update a phone when it changes state?
BTW, I created a group with all 4 phones but I don’t know how to update an individual phone when the group item receives an update (It is a Group:SwitchOR type of group)

This lead me to a bigger question. How can I further educate myself on writing rules? Would it be helpful to read a “Java for Dummies” book in order to learn the syntax rules and features of Java? (I know rules uses XTend but it would be a start.)

Since you already have a group, you can enumerate all items from a rule.
See

Inside your rule you then can check the current items state vs. the previous state (persistance needed) and then update the item.

I think the best way to educate yourself is actually to do something with your OpenHab. Learn from examples/solutions in the forums, try different things out and so on.
No need to be a JAVA expert in my opinion.

This is not tested and may contain some errors, but this is basically the easiest way since openHAB2.2

rule "Update User1 Last-Seen Time"
when 
    // this will get easier in future when the group trigger is accepted 
    // and added to the distribution, then only the group has to be listed
    Item Presence_Mobile_User1 changed or 
    Item Presence_Mobile_User2 changed or  
    Item Presence_Mobile_User3 changed
then
    var time = new DateTimeType() 
    postUpdate(  triggeringItem.name.toString , time.toString)
end 

there are some things which maybe will be of interrest in following threads, for your rules. I tried to add as many explanations as a could.

or here