I’m going to make an advertising system from scratch and put it inside of my Ruby on Rails Web Application. What books do you recommend and subjects (Algorithms, SQL?) should I learn in order to make this happen, where does one start?
I want the system to take User Data and when businesses advertise, the Users will get recommended Ads based on their likes, dislikes and other data. The advertising will take place only in my web application and on my website. I believe I am looking to do something similar to Facebook Ad System (images) and Google Ad Words, how did they do it?
Thank you.
P.S. I have little experience in Rails, Ruby language,Computer Science and programming in general but i am learning fast and building my application easily.
Ilya Grigorik did an awesome writeup with lots of code samples on this subject. See http://www.igvita.com/2007/01/15/svd-recommendation-system-in-ruby/
If you mean books on Ruby and Rails, I can recommend:
Programming Ruby (AKA "The Pickaxe")
Agile Web Development with Rails
Those were the starting points of my Ruby career.