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...

The Rails framework empowers developers with unprecedented levels of productivity by embracing principles such as "convention over configuration" and "don't repeat yourself." This paradigm is even apparent at the community level, where developers regularly share their custom framework extensions by way of Rails' plugins feature. Plugins offer a way for developers to extend the core Rails framework with their own custom features, allowing for rapid integration of features such as authentication, user ratings, and search.

Practical Rails Plugins shows you how to capitalize...