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.

DAVID BERUBE is 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 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’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 services firm The Casting Frontier.

David’s journalism has been in print in more than 65 countries, in magazines such as

Linux Magazine, Dr.Dobb’s Journal, 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.”