I??™d also like to thank
Jason Gilmore for teaching me quite a bit about the publishing business and about writing,
and for that matter, for putting up with my incessant questions.
Finally, I??™d like to thank my editors, originally Jason Gilmore and later Steve Anglin, as
well as my technical reviewer and co-conspirator Nick Plante, my project manager Beth
Christmas, and my copy editor Marilyn Smith.
xv
Introduction
This book is about general and scalable ways to create reports with Ruby. It covers using
a huge array of tools??”Rails, Gruff, Ghostscript, and many more??”but a common thread
links them all: they are powerful tools that will serve you even if you have a huge amount
of data. Using the reporting tools and techniques described in this book, you will be able
to solve almost any reporting problem, from small to very, very large.
This book assumes you have some knowledge of Ruby and Rails, as well as access to
a machine with Ruby, RubyGems, Rails, and MySQL installed. If you need to learn more
about Ruby, I recommend reading Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional by Peter
Cooper (Apress, 2007).
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