The editorial review on
amazon says that the book is for "Ruby and Rails developers seeking to create compelling business intelligence and reporting solutions using a wide variety of applications and services", so I'm afraid that the answer to your first question is no. We should of course wait for David to answer.
As for the second question, reporting is the action of generating reports. What does this mean? Well, imagine that you have a large database with a large number of tables and records, and you need a monthly report to summarize some actions to be viewed by your manager for example. Sending a dump of the database's data in 5000 pages to your manager will sure get you fired (or at least they would hang you from your legs to the ceiling).
You should deliver a neat report consisting of a couple of pages, with some nice colored charts and bar graphs instead. That's why you have reporting engines and tools.
I hope that answers your question.
[ February 06, 2008: Message edited by: Alaa Nassef ]
[ February 06, 2008: Message edited by: Alaa Nassef ]