Book Review: Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails

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. You can find it at apress, amazon US, amazon UK and all sorts of other places.