Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 312 pages
- Published by: Apress January 28, 2008
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 1590599330
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-1590599334
-
Book Dimensions:
9 x 7.1 x 1 inches
- Weighs: 1.3 pounds
Product Description
Business intelligence and real–time reporting mechanisms play a major role in any of today’s forward–looking business plans. With many of these solutions being moved to the Web, the popular Rails framework and its underlying Ruby language are playing a major role alongside web services in building the reporting solutions of tomorrow.
Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is the first book to comprehensively introduce this popular framework, guiding readers through a wide–ranging array of features. Note this isn’t a staid guide to generating traditional reports, but rather it shows you how the Ruby language and Rails framework can create truly compelling reporting services by plugging into popular third-party applications and services such as Google AdWords, UPS.com, iTunes, and SalesForce.com.
What you’ll learn
- Create reporting solutions for both the Web and the desktop.
- Integrate with powerful third–party retail solutions such as eBay, and Amazon.com in order to monitor your sales campaigns in real–time.
- Build an invoice reporting system using Rails and PayPal.
- Monitor your sales performance by taking advantage of SugarCRM’s web service offerings.
Who is this book for?
Ruby and Rails developers seeking to create compelling business intelligence and reporting solutions using a wide variety of applications and services.
About the Apress Practical Series
The Practical series from Apress is your best choice for getting the job done, period. From professional to expert, this series lets you apply project–motivated templates (or frameworks) step by step in a very direct, practical, and efficient manner toward current real–world projects that may be sitting on your desk. So whatever your career goal, Apress can be your trusted guide to take you where you want to go on your IT career empowerment path.
Related Titles
- Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional
- Practical Ruby Gems
- Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax: From Novice to Professional
About The Author
Berube is a Ruby developer, trainer, author, and speaker. He’s used both Ruby and Ruby on Rails for several years, starting in 2003 when he became a Ruby advocate after he wrote about the language for
Dr Dobb's Journal. Prior to this he worked professionally with PHP, Perl, C++, and Visual Basic.
His professional accomplishments include creating the Ruby on Rails engine for CoolRuby.com (http://coolruby.com), a site that tracks the latest Ruby developments, and working with ThoughtBot (http://www.thoughtbot.com.) on the Rails engine that powers
Sermo America's Top Doctor contest. Additionally, he has worked on several other Ruby projects, including the engine powering CyberKnowHow's
BirdFluBreakingNews search engine, and he also created the Slueshi text adventure game system, a multiplayer text game engine written in Ruby.
David's journalism has been in print in over 65 countries, in magazines such as
Linux Magazine, Dr Dobb's Journal, and
PHP International Magazine. He's also taught college courses and spoken publicly on topics such as "MySQL and You" and "Making Money with Open Source Software."
He lives in New Hampshire and his hobbies include basketball, yo-yos, and sleep.
Reader ReviewsPractical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is primarily a book about the presentation of reports. Having gone in expecting a mixture of presentation and production techniques I was a little surprised to find that the vast majority of the reader's time is spent looking at various GUI and graphing toolkits, export to MS Office and the like, and there's not much space given to managing large volumes of data, warehousing, and other such topics. That's not a criticism of the book so much as a caution to potential readers. After a little time spent looking at ActiveRecord, particularly focussing on using its calculation methods to save processor time, David Berube provides a pretty thorough coverage of a variety of ways to present reports. A few options for delivering data as PDFs, through a GUI, or directly into office are offered and a straightforward walkthrough is provided for each. The Rails content is minimal, and while the sample code could do with some refactoring and there'd be a case for using something more lightweight like merb it does the job. But I must confess to being a little disappointed that there wasn't more time spent on the data processing side of the equation. Having been building a lot of graphs lately and needing to write some new reporting code in the near future it was helpful to have some analysis of tools I might use, but I never felt like the book ever really dove into the complexities of reporting. There's space in a book of this sort for serious consideration of both data processing and of visualisation techniques, but neither is really offered. Each chapter simply answers a very tightly defined request rather than delving into the full problem domain, and that feels like a missed opportunity. If you're evaluating output options for your ruby application's reporting layer, this may be a handy book to have. It'll provide you with a sense of what tools are appropriate for which problems and more detailed sample code than is easily found on the web. But if you're looking to really grapple with reporting and visualisation you might be better off seeking out a good SQL reference and some of Tufte's books. Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.
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