Apress - Practical Reporting With Ruby And Rails

Introduction

This book is about general and scalable ways to create reports with Ruby. It covers using a huge array of tools—Rails, Gruff, Ghostscript, and many more—but a common thread links them all: they are powerful tools that will serve you even if you have a huge amount of data. Using the reporting tools and techniques described in this book, you will be able to solve almost any reporting problem, from small to very, very large. This book assumes you have some knowledge of Ruby and Rails, as well as access to a machine with Ruby, RubyGems, Rails, and MySQL installed. If you need to learn more about Ruby, I recommend reading Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional by Peter Cooper (Apress, 2007).

Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is divided into two parts. Part 1 covers the fundamentals of reporting with Ruby. You’ll find information about data access, data analysis, and graphing, as well as presenting your graphs on the desktop and on the Web. Part 2 gives specific, real-life examples of useful reports, ranging from monitoring eBay auctions, to tracking sales performance with SugarCRM, to conducting Google AdWords campaigns.

If you would like to contact me, you can do so through my web site at http://berubeconsulting.com or via e-mail, at djberube@berubeconsulting.com. I would love to hear from you.