Customer Reviews

Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

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Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is primarily a book about the presentation of reports. Having gone in expecting a mixture of presentation and production techniques I was a little surprised to find that the vast majority of the reader's time is spent looking at various GUI and graphing toolkits, export to MS Office and the like, and there's not much space given to managing large volumes of data, warehousing, and other such topics.

That's not a criticism of the book so much as a caution to potential readers. After a little time spent looking at ActiveRecord, particularly focussing on using its calculation methods to save processor time, David Berube provides a pretty thorough coverage of a variety of ways to present reports. A few options for delivering data as PDFs, through a GUI, or directly into office are offered and a straightforward walkthrough is provided for each. The Rails content is minimal, and while the sample code could do with some refactoring and there'd be a case for using something more lightweight like merb it does the job.

But I must confess to being a little disappointed that there wasn't more time spent on the data processing side of the equation. Having been building a lot of graphs lately and needing to write some new reporting code in the near future it was helpful to have some analysis of tools I might use, but I never felt like the book ever really dove into the complexities of reporting. There's space in a book of this sort for serious consideration of both data processing and of visualisation techniques, but neither is really offered. Each chapter simply answers a very tightly defined request rather than delving into the full problem domain, and that feels like a missed opportunity.

If you're evaluating output options for your ruby application's reporting layer, this may be a handy book to have. It'll provide you with a sense of what tools are appropriate for which problems and more detailed sample code than is easily found on the web. But if you're looking to really grapple with reporting and visualisation you might be better off seeking out a good SQL reference and some of Tufte's books.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.

In less than 300 pages, the author skims the field of reporting with Ruby on Rails. Not meant as an authoritative reference nor a tutorial on the Ruby language nor Rails framework, David points to useful utilities and gems that let the developer deliver analyzed, summarized, processed data in many formats. For a great many applications, in the view of the users, the reports ARE the application, so getting the right format and right data presentation are essential. David briefly touches on the database fundamentals and then dives right into a set of practical and easily-understood examples using common data (eBay, PayPal, SugarCRM) and demonstrates how to create output in the most demanded formats: web pages, PDFs, graphs, and the office formats. With a topic so broad and a book of moderate size, David trades depth for breadth and does a great job of pointing out many Rails idioms and useful 3rd party tools.

Disclaimer: David's an associate of mine and arranged for a review copy of the book.