Hands-On Azure for Developers. Implement rich Azure PaaS ecosystems using containers, serverless services, and storage solutions

Kamil Mrzygłód

Microsoft Azure is one of the fastest growing public cloud service providers in the market currently, and also holds the second highest market share after AWS. Azure has a sophisticated set of services that will help you build fault-tolerant and scalable cloud-based applications.Hands-On Azure for Developers will take you on a journey through multiple PaaS services available in Azure, including App Services, Functions, and Service Fabric, and explain in detail how to build a complete and reliable system with ease. You will learn about how to maximize your skills when building cloud-based solutions leveraging different SQL/NoSQL databases, serverless and messaging components, and even search engines such as Azure Search. In the concluding chapters, this book covers more advanced scenarios such as scalability best practices, serving static content with Azure CDN, and distributing loads with Azure Traffic Manager.By the end of the book, you will be able to build modern applications on the Azure cloud using the most popular and promising technologies, which will help make your solutions reliable, stable, and efficient.

Hands-On Big Data Analytics with PySpark. Analyze large datasets and discover techniques for testing, immunizing, and parallelizing Spark jobs

James Cross, Rudy Lai, Bartłomiej Potaczek

Apache Spark is an open source parallel-processing framework that has been around for quite some time now. One of the many uses of Apache Spark is for data analytics applications across clustered computers. In this book, you will not only learn how to use Spark and the Python API to create high-performance analytics with big data, but also discover techniques for testing, immunizing, and parallelizing Spark jobs.You will learn how to source data from all popular data hosting platforms, including HDFS, Hive, JSON, and S3, and deal with large datasets with PySpark to gain practical big data experience. This book will help you work on prototypes on local machines and subsequently go on to handle messy data in production and at scale. This book covers installing and setting up PySpark, RDD operations, big data cleaning and wrangling, and aggregating and summarizing data into useful reports. You will also learn how to implement some practical and proven techniques to improve certain aspects of programming and administration in Apache Spark.By the end of the book, you will be able to build big data analytical solutions using the various PySpark offerings and also optimize them effectively.

Hands-On Big Data Modeling. Effective database design techniques for data architects and business intelligence professionals

James Lee, Tao Wei, Suresh Kumar Mukhiya

Modeling and managing data is a central focus of all big data projects. In fact, a database is considered to be effective only if you have a logical and sophisticated data model. This book will help you develop practical skills in modeling your own big data projects and improve the performance of analytical queries for your specific business requirements.To start with, you’ll get a quick introduction to big data and understand the different data modeling and data management platforms for big data. Then you’ll work with structured and semi-structured data with the help of real-life examples. Once you’ve got to grips with the basics, you’ll use the SQL Developer Data Modeler to create your own data models containing different file types such as CSV, XML, and JSON. You’ll also learn to create graph data models and explore data modeling with streaming data using real-world datasets.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to design and develop efficient data models for varying data sizes easily and efficiently.

Hands-On Bitcoin Programming with Python. Build powerful online payment centric applications with Python

Harish Garg

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that’s changing the face of online payments. Hands-On Bitcoin Programming with Python teaches you to build software applications for mining and creating Bitcoins using Python.This book starts with the basics of both Bitcoin and blockchain and gives you an overview of these inherent concepts by showing you how to build Bitcoin-driven applications with Python. Packed with clear instructions and practical examples, you will learn to understand simple Python coding examples that work with this cryptocurrency.By the end of the book, you’ll be able to mine Bitcoins, accept Bitcoin payments on the app, and work with the basics of blockchain technology to create simply distributed ledgers.

Hands-On Blockchain for Python Developers. Empowering Python developers in the world of blockchain and smart contracts - Second Edition

Arjuna Sky Kok

We are living in the age of decentralized fi nance and NFTs. People swap tokens on Uniswap, borrow assets from Aave, send payments with stablecoins, trade art NFTs on OpenSea, and more. To build applications of this kind, you need to know how to write smart contracts.This comprehensive guide will help you explore all the features of Vyper, a programming language designed to write smart contracts. You’ll also explore the web3.py library. As you progress, you’ll learn how to connect to smart contracts, read values, and create transactions. To make sure your foundational knowledge is strong enough, the book guides you through Ape Framework, which can help you create decentralized exchanges, NFT marketplaces, voting applications, and more. Each project provides invaluable insights and hands-on experience, equipping you with the skills you need to build real-world blockchain solutions.By the end of this book, you’ll be well versed with writing common Web3 applications such as a decentralized exchange, an NFT marketplace, a voting application, and more.

Hands-On Blockchain for Python Developers. Gain blockchain programming skills to build decentralized applications using Python

Arjuna Sky Kok

Blockchain is seen as the main technological solution that works as a public ledger for all cryptocurrency transactions. This book serves as a practical guide to developing a full-fledged decentralized application with Python to interact with the various building blocks of blockchain applications.Hands-On Blockchain for Python Developers starts by demonstrating how blockchain technology and cryptocurrency hashing works. You will understand the fundamentals and benefits of smart contracts such as censorship resistance and transaction accuracy. As you steadily progress, you'll go on to build smart contracts using Vyper, which has a similar syntax to Python. This experience will further help you unravel the other benefits of smart contracts, including reliable storage and backup, and efficiency. You'll also use web3.py to interact with smart contracts and leverage the power of both the web3.py and Populus framework to build decentralized applications that offer security and seamless integration with cryptocurrencies. As you explore later chapters, you'll learn how to create your own token on top of Ethereum and build a cryptocurrency wallet graphical user interface (GUI) that can handle Ethereum and Ethereum Request for Comments (ERC-20) tokens using the PySide2 library. This will enable users to seamlessly store, send, and receive digital money. Toward the end, you'll implement InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) technology in your decentralized application to provide a peer-to-peer filesystem that can store and expose media.By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed in blockchain programming and be able to build end-to-end decentralized applications on a range of domains using Python.

Hands-On Blockchain with Hyperledger. Building decentralized applications with Hyperledger Fabric and Composer

Nitin Gaur, Luc Desrosiers, Venkatraman Ramakrishna, Petr Novotny, ...

Blockchain and Hyperledger technologies are hot topics today. Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Composer are open source projects that help organizations create private, permissioned blockchain networks. These find application in finance, banking, supply chain, and IoT among several other sectors. This book will be an easy reference to explore and build blockchain networks using Hyperledger technologies.The book starts by outlining the evolution of blockchain, including an overview of relevant blockchain technologies. You will learn how to configure Hyperledger Fabric and become familiar with its architectural components. Using these components, you will learn to build private blockchain networks, along with the applications that connect to them. Starting from principles first, you’ll learn to design and launch a network, implement smart contracts in chaincode and much more. By the end of this book, you will be able to build and deploy your own decentralized applications, handling the key pain points encountered in the blockchain life cycle.

Hands-On Bug Hunting for Penetration Testers. A practical guide to help ethical hackers discover web application security flaws

Joe Marshall

Bug bounties have quickly become a critical part of the security economy. This book shows you how technical professionals with an interest in security can begin productively—and profitably—participating in bug bounty programs.You will learn about SQli, NoSQLi, XSS, XXE, and other forms of code injection. You’ll see how to create CSRF PoC HTML snippets, how to discover hidden content (and what to do with it once it’s found), and how to create the tools for automated pentesting work?ows.Then, you’ll format all of this information within the context of a bug report that will have the greatest chance of earning you cash. With detailed walkthroughs that cover discovering, testing, and reporting vulnerabilities, this book is ideal for aspiring security professionals. You should come away from this work with the skills you need to not only find the bugs you're looking for, but also the best bug bounty programs to participate in, and how to grow your skills moving forward in freelance security research.

Hands-On Business Intelligence with DAX. Discover the intricacies of this powerful query language to gain valuable insights from your data

Ian Horne

Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) is known for its ability to increase efficiency by extracting new information from data that is already present in your model. With this book, you’ll learn to use DAX’s functionality and flexibility in the BI and data analytics domains.You’ll start by learning the basics of DAX, along with understanding the importance of good data models, and how to write efficient DAX formulas by using variables and formatting styles. You’ll then explore how DAX queries work with the help of examples. The book will guide you through optimizing the BI workflow by writing powerful DAX queries. Next, you’ll learn to manipulate and load data of varying complexity within Microsoft products such as Power BI, SQL Server, and Excel Power Pivot. You’ll then discover how to build and extend your data models to gain additional insights, before covering progressive DAX syntax and functions to understand complex relationships in DAX. Later, you’ll focus on important DAX functions, specifically those related to tables, date and time, filtering, and statistics. Finally, you’ll delve into advanced topics such as how the formula and storage engines work to optimize queries.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained hands-on experience in employing DAX to enhance your data models by extracting new information and gaining deeper insights.

Hands-On Business Intelligence with Qlik Sense. Implement self-service data analytics with insights and guidance from Qlik Sense experts

Pablo Labbe, Clever Anjos, Kaushik Solanki, Jerry DiMaso

Qlik Sense allows you to explore simple-to-complex data to reveal hidden insights and data relationships to make business-driven decisions.Hands-On Business Intelligence with Qlik Sense begins by helping you get to grips with underlying Qlik concepts and gives you an overview of all Qlik Sense’s features. You will learn advanced modeling techniques and learn how to analyze the data loaded using a variety of visualization objects. You’ll also be trained on how to share apps through Qlik Sense Enterprise and Qlik Sense Cloud and how to perform aggregation with AGGR. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll explore the stories feature to create data-driven presentations and update an existing story. This book will guide you through the GeoAnalytics feature with the geo-mapping object and GeoAnalytics connector. Furthermore, you’ll learn about the self-service analytics features and perform data forecasting using advanced analytics. Lastly, you’ll deploy Qlik Sense apps for mobile and tablet. By the end of this book, you will be well-equipped to run successful business intelligence applications using Qlik Sense's functionality, data modeling techniques, and visualization best practices.

Hands-On C++ Game Animation Programming. Learn modern animation techniques from theory to implementation with C++ and OpenGL

Gabor Szauer

Animation is one of the most important parts of any game. Modern animation systems work directly with track-driven animation and provide support for advanced techniques such as inverse kinematics (IK), blend trees, and dual quaternion skinning.This book will walk you through everything you need to get an optimized, production-ready animation system up and running, and contains all the code required to build the animation system. You’ll start by learning the basic principles, and then delve into the core topics of animation programming by building a curve-based skinned animation system. You’ll implement different skinning techniques and explore advanced animation topics such as IK, animation blending, dual quaternion skinning, and crowd rendering. The animation system you will build following this book can be easily integrated into your next game development project. The book is intended to be read from start to finish, although each chapter is self-contained and can be read independently as well.By the end of this book, you’ll have implemented a modern animation system and got to grips with optimization concepts and advanced animation techniques.

Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex. Create custom conversational and voice interfaces for your Amazon Echo devices and web platforms

Sam Williams

Have you ever wondered how Alexa apps are made, how voice-enabled technologies work, or how chatbots function? And why tech giants such as Amazon and Google are investing in voice technologies? A better question is: why should I start developing on these platforms? Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex covers all features of the Alexa Skills kit with real-world examples that help you develop skills to integrate Echo and chatbots into Facebook, Slack, and Twilio with the Amazon Lex platform.The book starts with teaching you how to set up your local environment and AWS CLI so that you can automate the process of uploading AWS Lambda from your local machine. You will then learn to develop Alexa Skills and Lex chatbots using Lambda functions to control functionality. Once you’ve come to grips with this, you will learn to create increasingly complex chatbots, integrate Amazon S3, and change the way Alexa talks to the user. In the concluding chapters, we shift our focus to Amazon Lex and messaging chatbots. We will explore Alexa, learn about DynamoDB databases, and add cards to user conversations.By the end of this book, you will have explored a full set of technologies that will enable you to create your own voice and messaging chatbots using Amazon.

Hands-On Chatbots and Conversational UI Development. Build chatbots and voice user interfaces with Chatfuel, Dialogflow, Microsoft Bot Framework, Twilio, and Alexa Skills

Srini Janarthanam

Conversation as an interface is the best way for machines to interact with us using the universally accepted human tool that is language. Chatbots and voice user interfaces are two flavors of conversational UIs. Chatbots are real-time, data-driven answer engines that talk in natural language and are context-aware. Voice user interfaces are driven by voice and can understand and respond to users using speech. This book covers both types of conversational UIs by leveraging APIs from multiple platforms. We'll take a project-based approach to understand how these UIs are built and the best use cases for deploying them. We'll start by building a simple messaging bot from the Facebook Messenger API to understand the basics of bot building. Then we move on to creating a Task model that can perform complex tasks such as ordering and planning events with the newly-acquired-by-Google Dialogflow and Microsoft Bot framework. We then turn to voice-enabled UIs that are capable of interacting with users using speech with Amazon Alexa and Google Home. By the end of the book, you will have created your own line of chatbots and voice UIs for multiple leading platforms.

Hands-On Cloud Administration in Azure. Implement, monitor, and manage important Azure services and components including IaaS and PaaS

Mustafa Toroman

Azure continues to dominate the public cloud market and grow rapidly thanks to a number of recent innovations. Azure's wide range of services and support has led to a large number of customers switching to Azure cloud.Hands-On Cloud Administration in Azure starts with the basics of Azure cloud fundamentals and key concepts of the cloud computing ecosystem and services. Then, you will gradually get acquainted with core services provided by Azure, including Azure VNet, types and assignments of IP addresses, and network security groups. You will also work on creating and administering Azure Virtual Machines, types of virtual machines (VMs), and design VM solutions based on computing workloads. As you make your way through the chapters, you will explore Azure App Service, discover how to host your web apps in Azure, and monitor and troubleshoot them. In the concluding chapters, you will learn more complex and abstract services, such as Azure Storage, Azure Backup, and Azure Site Recovery. You will also get to grips with Azure SQL Databases and the SQL on Azure VM concept.By the end of this book, you will have obtained practical experience of working with Azure services and Azure administration, along with maintaining, monitoring, and securing your Azure resources.

Hands-On Cloud Development with WildFly. Develop, deploy, and configure cloud-based, enterprise Java applications with WildFly Swarm and OpenShift

Tomasz Adamski

The book starts by introducing you to WildFly Swarm—a tool that allows you to create runnable microservices from Java EE components. You’ll learn the basics of Swarm operation—creating microservices containing only the parts of enterprise runtime needed in a specific case. Later, you’ll learn how to configure and test those services.In order to deploy our services in the cloud, we’ll use OpenShift. You’ll get to know basic information on its architecture, features, and relationship to Docker and Kubernetes. Later, you’ll learn how to deploy and configure your services to run in the OpenShift cloud.In the last part of the book, you’ll see how to make your application production-ready. You’ll find out how to configure continuous integration for your services using Jenkins, make your application resistant to network failures using Hystrix, and how to secure them using Keycloak. By the end of the book, you’ll have a functional example application and will have practical knowledge of Java EE cloud development that can be used as a reference in your other projects.

Hands-On Cloud Solutions with Azure. Architecting, developing, and deploying the Azure way

Greg Leonardo

Azure provides cloud-based solutions to support your business demands. Building and running solutions on Azure will help your business maximize the return on investment and minimize the total cost of ownership.Hands-On Cloud Solutions with Azure focuses on addressing the architectural decisions that usually arise when you design or migrate a solution to Microsoft Azure. You will start by designing the building blocks of infrastructure solution on Azure, such as Azure compute, storage, and networking, followed by exploring the database options it offers. You will get to grips with designing scalable web and mobile solutions and understand where to host your Active Directory and Identity Solution. Moving on, you’ll learn how to extend DevOps to Azure.You will also beneft from some exciting services that enable extremely smooth operations and streamlined DevOps between on-premises and cloud. The book will help you to design a secure environment for your solution, on both the Cloud and hybrid. Toward the end, you’ll see how to manage and monitor cloud and hybrid solutions.By the end of this book, you will be armed with all the tools and knowledge you need to properly plan and design your solutions on Azure, whether it’s for a brand new project or migration project.