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.