I also have the second edition and can't praise it enough. I have a computer science degree but never really applied it to actual development as I am a business analyst in my professional life. This book bridged the gap and I quickly became proficient enough in Rails to develop a side project.
Great idea. I don't usually watch Dragons Den but one of the few episodes I watched had this exact thing and they said they were already partnering with Sony and that their tags were in the box of every Sony laptop (I think).
I had never really created anything before and wanted to learn Rails.
Built it and have been paying $10/mo in hosting for the last two years. I use it and have around 30 active users (couple hundred non-active). So I kind of keep it going just because I realize that the 30 people who use it have invested a lot of time entering scores and stuff.
My monetization strategy was to get traffic and rely on Google ads.
Hopefully they will open it up to Canada in the process. They left it open by mistake I think for a few days a while ago but now it won't let you Add a Canadian number.
I tried to use NHL box scores to predict NHL outcomes. Seemed like a pretty good opportunity to use machine learning. Ended up only being able to predict at like 54% or something like that which isn't even enough to break even.
What I did find though was that if I looked for games where my estimated accuracy rate was high and the odds were good then I probably could have bet on those games for a profit but they were very rare.