This is a hands-on book with plenty of well-explained code. Each chapter has a standalone project in which a complete web application with specific features of a social networking site is emphasized. The final chapter of the book is a project that has a complete and fully developed social networking site. Each chapter begins with a brief description of the features of the Internet service and the market it is within. After extracting the main features of the service, the chapter goes into explaining how a clone of the service can be designed, followed by a short description of the technologies and platforms being used. The bulk of the chapter goes into describing how the clone is built, with step-by-step explanations and code examples. Finally, the chapter shows how the finished clone can be deployed on the Internet. This book is written for web application programmers with an intermediate knowledge of Ruby. You should also know how web applications work and you have used at least some of the cloned Internet services before. If you are a trying to find out exactly how can you make your very own customized applications such as TinyURL, Twitter, Flickr, or Facebook, this book is for you. Programmers who want to include features of these Internet services into their own web applications will also find this book interesting. Chang Sau Sheong Chang Sau Sheong has more than 15 years experience in software application development and has spent much of his career working on Web and Internet-based applications. He started up elipva, an e-business software company, and was the Vice President of Product Engineering as well as Chief Architect. Subsequently he was Director of Software Development for Welcome Real-time, a bank loyalty software company, Engineering Director for Yahoo! Southeast Asia and Chief Technology Officer for Garena Online, an online game publishing company. He is currently the Director of the Applied Cloud Computing Lab in HP Labs Singapore, the research arm of Hewlett Packard, leading a team of engineers to implement cloud computing solutions. Sau Sheong frequently writes for technical magazines and journals, including Java Report, Java World, and Dr. Dobb's Journal. He is a passionate programmer who contributes to open source projects in various technologies including Ruby and Java. He has a wide range of experience in web application development on the Internet and mobile devices. His first book was 'Ruby on Rails Mashup Projects' in 2008, also published by Packt Publishing. Sau Sheong hails from tropical Malaysia but spent most of his adult and working life in sunny Singapore, where he shares his spare time between enthusiastically writing software and equally enthusiastically playing Nintendo Wii with his wife and son. He has a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering, a Masters degree in Commercial Law, and is a certified international arbitrator.