this print for content only—size & color not accurate spine = 0.729" 312 page count Books for professionals By professionals ® Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails Dear Reader, Perhaps the most important skill any commercial Ruby programmer can have is to write reports for data from disparate data sources. Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails will show you how to do just that, using concrete, real-life examples. In fact, this book covers three distinct concepts: how to load data from different sources, how to interpret the data, and how to present the data. You’ll find out how to load data from a wide range of sources in various formats, including web-based data sources like Google AdWords and eBay. I’ll show you how to analyze data to produce meaningful reports using a variety of techniques, from Active Record statistical functions to custom SQL. The examples include conducting SugarCRM sales campaigns, analyzing data from Apache web logs, and many other practical applications. Displaying the data visually can be the most important part. You’ll learn how to present data on the Web and on the desktop. I’ll cover graphing using Gruff, Scruffy, CSS Graphs Helper, and Markaby, along with easy ways to create text and HTML reports. The examples demonstrate how to display reports as Excel spreadsheets or deliver them as PDF files, as well as how to create a Windows desktop tool that downloads data from a Rails web application into a Microsoft Access database. That’s not all, though. This book also covers performance-enhancing techniques such as using Active Record Extensions, which let you import data at lightning speed, and rolling your own SQL statements to optimize slow queries. I hope you will enjoy learning about reporting as much as I enjoyed writing about it. David Berube Author of Practical Ruby Gems US $42.99 Shelve in Programming Languages/ Ruby User level: Intermediate Berube Reporting with Ruby and Rails The eXperT’s Voice ® in open source Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails cyan MaGenTa yelloW Black panTone 123 c David Berube Companion eBook Available THE APRESS ROADMAP Practical Rails Projects Beginning Ruby Beginning Rails Practical Ruby Gems Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails www.apress.com SOURCE CODE ONLINE Companion eBook See last page for details on $10 eBook version ISBN-13: 978-1-59059-933-4 ISBN-10: 1-59059-933-0 9 781590 599334 5 4 2 9 9 Create and present attractive reports, graphs, and documents using Ruby on the Web, on the desktop, and on the server. Practical [...]... 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... a Ruby developer, trainer, author, and speaker He has used both Ruby and Ruby on Rails for several years, starting in 2003 (he became a Ruby advocate after writing about the language for Dr Dobb’s Journal) Prior to this, David worked professionally with PHP, Perl, C++, and Visual Basic He is the author of the Apress book Practical Ruby Gems David’s professional accomplishments include creating the Ruby. .. programmer and a partner in Ubikorp Internet Services, Nick specializes in helping web startups accelerate their development with Ruby and Rails He is a co-organizer of the New Hampshire Ruby Users Group and the Rails Rumble coding competition, and contributes to numerous open source projects When he is not dreaming up new applications or gushing about how great Ruby is, Nick enjoys independent music and. .. T his 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... 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’s Top Doctor contest Additionally, he has worked on several other Ruby projects, including the engine powering CyberKnowHow’s Birdflubreakingnews.com search engine He currently works with the Los Angeles digital-casting... Acknowledgments I ’d like to thank my parents and my sisters; I can’t imagine writing this book without them I’d also like to thank the many friends who have supported me; in particular, I’d like to thank Wayne Hammar, Matthew Gifford, and Michael Southwick I’d also like to thank the vast array of professional associates I’ve worked with and learned from, and in particular, I’d like to thank Joey Rubenstein... Gilmore for teaching me quite a bit about the publishing business and about writing, and for that matter, for putting up with my incessant questions Finally, I’d like to thank my editors, originally Jason Gilmore and later Steve Anglin, as well as my technical reviewer and co-conspirator Nick Plante, my project manager Beth Christmas, and my copy editor Marilyn Smith xv 9330FM.qxd 1/9/08 2:48 PM Page... Red Hat Magazine, and International PHP Magazine He has also taught college courses, guest lectured—notably at Harvard University and spoken publicly on topics such as “MySQL and You” and “Making Money with Open Source Software.” xi 9330FM.qxd 1/9/08 2:48 PM Page xii 9330FM.qxd 1/9/08 2:48 PM Page xiii About the Technical Reviewer sNICK PLANTE is a programmer, author, entrepreneur, and (most of all)... 232 s CHAPTER 12 Creating Reports with Ruby and Microsoft Office 233 Interacting with Microsoft Office 233 Working with Microsoft Excel 234 Working with Microsoft Word 234 Working with Microsoft Access 236 Importing Web-Form Data... way to access databases and database tables in Ruby It is a powerful object-relational mapping (ORM) library that lets you easily model databases using an object-oriented interface Besides being a stand-alone ORM package for Ruby, Active Record will also be familiar to web application developers as the model part of the webapplication framework Ruby on Rails (see http://ar.rubyonrails.org/) Active . Berube Companion eBook Available THE APRESS ROADMAP Practical Rails Projects Beginning Ruby Beginning Rails Practical Ruby Gems Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails www .apress. com SOURCE CODE ONLINE Companion. $42.99 Shelve in Programming Languages/ Ruby User level: Intermediate Berube Reporting with Ruby and Rails The eXperT’s Voice ® in open source Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails cyan MaGenTa yelloW . 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