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. This book offers a comprehensive introduction to this popular framework. 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.

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. This book offers a comprehensive introduction to this popular framework. 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.

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 upon the wide variety of plugins at your disposal by guiding you through their integration into a number of interesting projects. You’ll learn how to rapidly augment projects involving asynchronous video transcoding, geocoding and mapping, content management, community ratings, and PDF generation. You’ll also learn how to create and distribute your own plugins. The ultimate guide to building powerful web sites faster using Rails plugins Demonstrates how to use popular plugins within a number of practical (and fully functional) projects and mini–applications Shows you how to create and distribute your own plugins

The Complete Guide to Avoiding and Fixing Common Rails 3 Code and Design Problems As developers worldwide have adopted the powerful Ruby on Rails web framework, many have fallen victim to common mistakes that reduce code quality, performance, reliability, stability, scalability, and maintainability. RailsTM AntiPatterns identifies these widespread Rails code and design problems, explains why they’re bad and why they happen—and shows exactly what to do instead. The book is organized into concise, modular chapters—each outlines a single common AntiPattern and offers detailed, cookbook-style code solutions that were previously difficult or impossible to find. Leading Rails developers Chad Pytel and Tammer Saleh also offer specific guidance for refactoring existing bad code or design to reflect sound object-oriented principles and established Rails best practices. With their help, developers, architects, and testers can dramatically improve new and existing applications, avoid future problems, and establish superior Rails coding standards throughout their organizations. This book will help you understand, avoid, and solve problems with Model layer code, from general object-oriented programming violations to complex SQL and excessive redundancy Domain modeling, including schema and database issues such as normalization and serialization View layer tools and conventions Controller-layer code, including RESTful code Service-related APIs, including timeouts, exceptions, backgrounding, and response codes Third-party code, including plug-ins and gems Testing, from test suites to test-driven development processes Scaling and deployment Database issues, including migrations and validations System design for “graceful degradation” in the real world

The Complete Guide to Writing More Maintainable, Manageable, Pleasing, and Powerful Ruby Applications Ruby's widely admired ease of use has a downside: Too many Ruby and Rails applications have been created without concern for their long-term maintenance or evolution. The Web is awash in Ruby code that is now virtually impossible to change or extend. This text helps you solve that problem by using powerful real-world object-oriented design techniques, which it thoroughly explains using simple and practical Ruby examples. This book focuses squarely on object-oriented Ruby application design. Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby will guide you to superior outcomes, whatever your previous Ruby experience. Novice Ruby programmers will find specific rules to live by; intermediate Ruby programmers will find valuable principles they can flexibly interpret and apply; and advanced Ruby programmers will find a common language they can use to lead development and guide their colleagues. This guide will help you Understand how object-oriented programming can help you craft Ruby code that is easier to maintain and upgrade Decide what belongs in a single Ruby class Avoid entangling objects that should be kept separate Define flexible interfaces among objects Reduce programming overhead costs with duck typing Successfully apply inheritance Build objects via composition Design cost-effective tests Solve common problems associated with poorly designed Ruby code

Revitalized by Ruby on Rails, the Ruby language continues to grow in popularity. Books like this are necessary to fill the demand. Here is a classic of its kind; required reading for Ruby programmers who have already mastered the basics and want to learn higher level techniques. Practical Ruby Projects presents nine diverse projects that will teach new and innovative techniques in a learn-by-example fashion. They include a turn-based adventure game and a generative music creator. While there are many other Ruby titles, none of them take this unique project-based approach to teaching.

The Complete Guide to Writing Maintainable, Manageable, Pleasing, and Powerful Object-Oriented Applications Object-oriented programming languages exist to help you create beautiful, straightforward applications that are easy to change and simple to extend. Unfortunately, the world is awash with object-oriented (OO) applications that are difficult to understand and expensive to change. Practical Object-Oriented Design, Second Edition, immerses you in an OO mindset and teaches you powerful, real-world, object-oriented design techniques with simple and practical examples. Sandi Metz demonstrates how to build new applications that can “survive success” and repair existing applications that have become impossible to change. Each technique is illustrated with extended examples in the easy-to-understand Ruby programming language, all downloadable from the companion website, poodr.com. Fully updated for Ruby 2.5, this guide shows how to Decide what belongs in a single class Avoid entangling objects that should be kept separate Define flexible interfaces among objects Reduce programming overhead costs with duck typing Successfully apply inheritance Build objects via composition Whatever your previous object-oriented experience, this concise guide will help you achieve the superior outcomes you’re looking for. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Nothing less than a revolution in the way web applications are constructed,Ruby on Rails (RoR) boasts a straightforward and intuitive nature that avoids programming repetition and makes it infinitely easier to build for the web. This book captures the current best practices to show you the most efficient way to build a spectacular web application with RoR. You?ll learn everything you need to know in order to extend Rails so that you can take advantage of the many exciting and wonderful things that are being done by the diligent RoR programming community.

Practical Rails Social Networking Sites shows you the complete development cycle of a social networking community web site. The project develops first as a simple content management system, after which author Alan Bradburne progressively adds features in order to build a full Web 2.0-enabled community-based social networking site using Ruby on Rails. You will learn how to make the best use of the Ruby on Rails framework within a large project and how to implement and adapt features specific to a community. The book offers practical advice and tips for developing and testing, along with guidance on how to take your site live, as well as optimize and maintain it. The book also explores how to integrate with other community sites such as Flickr and Google Maps, and how to make good use of Rails Ajax features. You will also learn how to optimize and adapt your site to work well on mobile browsers.

Ruby in Practice increases your productivity by showing you specific Ruby techniques you can use in your projects. The book offers detailed strategies for using Ruby in a large-scale environment. You'll see concrete examples of integration, messaging, web development, and databases, all presented in a clear Problem/Solution format. This book won't help you push your deadline back, but it will help you get the job done in less time. Above all, Ruby in Practice is a practical book for developers who want an in depth understanding of the Ruby language and its toolset. The book is divided into three major parts. The first part concentrates on issues that developers face both from within their organizations and from their peers. The authors weigh the costs and benefits of using Ruby in enterprise development projects, the over-riding theme being that every developer should always aim to use the right tool for any particular job. The authors then examine the pros and cons of developing with Ruby, and where appropriate, compare Ruby to other languages, both conceptually and in code. The second part discusses techniques for communication and integration of systems. The authors describe how libraries and techniques are used to facilitate messaging, web development and communication automation. They also focus on how the strategies in the first section can be used with these libraries to make development more flexible and efficient. The last part shows how to manage data and integrate with existing data using Ruby. The authors describe techniques for using existing Ruby libraries that either replace popular Java libraries or can interface with existing data in a different way. They go on to show you how strategies covered in the first section can be used to enable Ruby to interact with existing assets or to build new data systems. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.