Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails (eBook)

David 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, a site that tracks the latest Ruby developments, and working with 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.

Contents at a Glance 5
Contents 6
About the Author 10
About the Technical Reviewer 11
Acknowledgments 12
Introduction 13
Introducing Reporting with Ruby 14
Data Access Fundamentals 15
Choosing a Database 15
Using Active Record As a Database Access Library 17
Summary 29
Calculating Statistics with Active Record 30
Grouping and Aggregation 30
Analyzing Data with Grouping and Aggregates 33
Summary 42
Creating Graphs with Ruby 44
Choosing a Graphing Utility 44
Graphing Data 48
Summary 60
Creating Reports on the Desktop 61
Choosing a Desktop Format 61
Exporting Data to Spreadsheets 62
Creating GUIs with Ruby 70
Summary 83
Connecting Your Reports to the World 84
Choosing a Web Framework 84
Live Intranet Web Reporting with Rails 85
Graphical Reporting with Rails 100
Summary 116
Examples of Reporting with Ruby 118
Tracking Auctions with eBay 119
Using eBay APIs 119
Obtaining Competitive Intelligence via eBay Web Services 121
Summary 139
Tracking Expenditures with PayPal 140
Gathering Data from PayPal 140
Reporting PayPal Expenses 143
Summary 160
Creating Sales Performance Reports with SugarCRM 161
Installing SugarCRM 161
Sales Force Reporting 162
Summary 175
Investment Tracking with Fidelity 176
Writing a Small Server to Get Report Data 176
Tracking a Stock Portfolio 178
Summary 192
Calculating Costs by Analyzing Apache Web Logs 193
Speeding Up Insertions with ActiveRecord:: Extensions 194
Creating PDFs with PDF:: Writer 195
Cost- Per- Sale Reporting 196
Summary 216
Tracking the News with Google News 218
Using FeedTools to Parse RSS 219
Company News Coverage Reporting 220
Summary 235
Creating Reports with Ruby and Microsoft Office 236
Interacting with Microsoft Office 236
Importing Web- Form Data into an Access Database 239
Summary 263
Tracking Your Ads with Google AdWords 264
Obtaining Google AdWords Reports 265
Planning an AdWords Campaign 270
Summary 287
Index 288