Hi folks,
I am pleased to announce that Mike Milner and I have finished the
Ruport Book. We have published it under our own company (Rinara Press
LLC) through Lulu.
With the help of the Ruport community, we’ve refined the book over the
last few weeks to meet the needs of our users. We think it will be a
great help to anyone trying to learn how to do reporting in Ruby /
Rails using Ruport.
The book is split up into three parts. It starts with a tutorial
introduction to Ruport that’s suitable for beginners. It then dives
into some real world use of Ruport and its supporting libraries in a
simple Rails 2 app I’ve been working on for a mid-size dental office.
Finally, we round it off with a series of quick reference cheatsheets
which were developed based on common questions Ruport users have.
So far, we’ve heard a lot of positive things about this format, and it
seems to be helping our users a whole lot.
== Get it ==
You can see the HTML formatted book here:
http://ruportbook.com/outline.html
You can also see a full preview of what the PDF and printed book look
like on Lulu:
http://www.lulu.com/browse/preview.php?fCID=1700117
At 160 pages, it is certainly the most comprehensive documentation on
Ruport out there. If you’d like to buy a PDF or Print copy, you can
do so here:
http://www.lulu.com/content/1700117
== More Information ==
This book is open source! It is released under the very permissive
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, so we hope this
will make contributing to the book or reusing parts of its content as
easy as possible for you.
We also are donating 25% of our revenues to Engineers Without Borders,
USA to help improve the quality of life in developing countries
worldwide. This is one way we’re taking advantage of the
self-publishing model, and we hope that in a few months we’ll be able
to send a large donation their way.
Finally, because this effort has mostly been something Mike and I have
put forth in our spare time with help from the community, we’re
relying primarily on word of mouth to market the book. If you enjoy
it, please tell your friends. If you don’t, please email us and tell
us why.
You can keep an eye on http://ruportbook.blogspot.com/ for further
announcements, but we hope you enjoy the book, and that it is helpful
to you.
-greg & mike