Building an RPG with Unreal 4.x. Get to grips with building the foundations of an RPG using Unreal Engine 4.x

Alan R. Stagner, Steve Santello

Now that Unreal Engine 4 has become one of the most cutting edge game engines in the world, developers are looking for the best ways of creating games of any genre in the engine. This book will lay out the foundation of creating a turn-based RPG in Unreal Engine 4.12. The book starts by walking you through creating a turn-based battle system that can hold commands for party members and enemies. You’ll get your hands dirty by creating NPCs such as shop owners, and important mechanics, that make up every RPG such as a currency system, inventory, dialogue, and character statistics. Although this book specifically focuses on the creation of a turn-based RPG, there are a variety of topics that can be utilized when creating many other types of genres.By the end of the book, you will be able to build upon core RPG framework elements to create your own game experience.

Building Analytics Teams. Harnessing analytics and artificial intelligence for business improvement

John K. Thompson, Douglas B. Laney

In Building Analytics Teams, John K. Thompson, with his 30+ years of experience and expertise, illustrates the fundamental concepts of building and managing a high-performance analytics team, including what to do, who to hire, projects to undertake, and what to avoid in the journey of building an analytically sound team. The core processes in creating an effective analytics team and the importance of the business decision-making life cycle are explored to help achieve initial and sustainable success.The book demonstrates the various traits of a successful and high-performing analytics team and then delineates the path to achieve this with insights on the mindset, advanced analytics models, and predictions based on data analytics. It also emphasizes the significance of the macro and micro processes required to evolve in response to rapidly changing business needs.The book dives into the methods and practices of managing, developing, and leading an analytics team. Once you've brought the team up to speed, the book explains how to govern executive expectations and select winning projects.By the end of this book, you will have acquired the knowledge to create an effective business analytics team and develop a production environment that delivers ongoing operational improvements for your organization.

Building and Automating Penetration Testing Labs in the Cloud. Set up cost-effective hacking environments for learning cloud security on AWS, Azure, and GCP

Joshua Arvin Lat

The significant increase in the number of cloud-related threats and issues has led to a surge in the demand for cloud security professionals. This book will help you set up vulnerable-by-design environments in the cloud to minimize the risks involved while learning all about cloud penetration testing and ethical hacking.This step-by-step guide begins by helping you design and build penetration testing labs that mimic modern cloud environments running on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Next, you’ll find out how to use infrastructure as code (IaC) solutions to manage a variety of lab environments in the cloud. As you advance, you’ll discover how generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, can be leveraged to accelerate the preparation of IaC templates and configurations. You’ll also learn how to validate vulnerabilities by exploiting misconfigurations and vulnerabilities using various penetration testing tools and techniques. Finally, you’ll explore several practical strategies for managing the complexity, cost, and risks involved when dealing with penetration testing lab environments in the cloud.By the end of this penetration testing book, you’ll be able to design and build cost-effective vulnerable cloud lab environments where you can experiment and practice different types of attacks and penetration testing techniques.

Building and Delivering Microservices on AWS. Master software architecture patterns to develop and deliver microservices to AWS Cloud

Amar Deep Singh, Jeff Carpenter

Reliable automation is crucial for any code change going into production. A release pipeline enables you to deliver features for your users efficiently and promptly. AWS CodePipeline, with its powerful integration and automation capabilities of building, testing, and deployment, offers a unique solution to common software delivery issues such as outages during deployment, a lack of standard delivery mechanisms, and challenges faced in creating sustainable pipelines.You’ll begin by developing a Java microservice and using AWS services such as CodeCommit, CodeArtifact, and CodeGuru to manage and review the source code. You’ll then learn to use the AWS CodeBuild service to build code and deploy it to AWS infrastructure and container services using the CodeDeploy service. As you advance, you’ll find out how to provision cloud infrastructure using CloudFormation templates and Terraform. The concluding chapters will show you how to combine all these AWS services to create a reliable and automated CodePipeline for delivering microservices from source code check-in to deployment without any downtime. Finally, you’ll discover how to integrate AWS CodePipeline with third-party services such as Bitbucket, Blazemeter, Snyk, and Jenkins.By the end of this microservices book, you’ll have gained the hands-on skills to build release pipelines for your applications.

Building Android Games with Cocos2d-x. Learn to create engaging and spectacular games for Android using Cocos2d-x

Raydelto Hernadez, Raydelto Hernandez

Building Android UIs with Custom Views. Build amazing custom user interfaces with Android custom views

Raimon Rafols Montane

To build great user interfaces for your Android apps that go beyond the standard UI elements, you need to use custom Android views. With these, you can give your app a distinctive look and ensure that it functions properly across multiple devices. This book will help you construct a great UI for your apps by teaching you how to create custom Android views. You will start by creating your first Android custom view and go through the design considerations. You will then see how the right choices will enable your custom view to perform seamlessly across multiple platforms and Android versions. You will create custom styleable attributes that work with Android XML layouts, learn to process touch events, define custom attributes, and add properties and events to them. By the end of this book, you will be able to create apps with custom views that are responsive and adaptable to make your app distinctive and an instant hit with its users.

Building Apple Watch Projects. Click here to enter text

Stuart Grimshaw

With Apple’s eagerly anticipated entry into the wearable arena, the field is wide open for a new era of app development. The Apple Watch is one of the most important technologies of our time. This easy-to-understand book takes beginners on a delightful journey of discovering the features available to the developer, right up to the completion of medium-level projects ready for App Store submission. It provides the fastest way to develop real-world apps for the Apple Watch by teaching you the concepts of Watch UI, visual haptic and audio, message and data exchange between watch and phone, Web communication, and finally Visual, haptic as well as audio feedback for users.By the end of this book, you will have developed at least four fully functioning apps for deployment on watchOS 2.

Building Applications with Spring 5 and Kotlin. Build scalable and reactive applications with Spring combined with the productivity of Kotlin

Miloš Vasić

Kotlin is being used widely by developers because of its light weight, built-in null safety, and functional and reactive programming aspects. Kotlin shares the same pragmatic, innovative and opinionated mindset as Spring, so they work well together. Spring when combined with Kotlin helps you to reach a new level of productivity. This combination has helped developers to create Functional Applications using both the tools together. This book will teach you how to take advantage of these developments and build robust, scalable and reactive applications with ease. In this book, you will begin with an introduction to Spring and its setup with Kotlin. You will then dive into assessing the design considerations of your application. Then you will learn to use Spring (with Spring Boot) along with Kotlin to build a robust backend in a microservice architecture with a REST based collaboration, and leverage Project Reactor in your application. You’ll then learn how to integrate Spring Data and Spring Cloud to manage configurations for database interaction and cloud deployment. You’ll also learn to use Spring Security to beef up security of your application before testing it with the JUnit framework and then deploying it on a cloud platform like AWS.

Building Applications with Spring 5 and Vue.js 2. Build a modern, full-stack web application using Spring Boot and Vuex

James J. Ye

Building Applications with Spring 5 and Vue.js 2, with its practical approach, helps you become a full-stack web developer. As well as knowing how to write frontend and backend code, a developer has to tackle all problems encountered in the application development life cycle – starting from the simple idea of an application, to the UI and technical designs, and all the way to implementation, testing, production deployment, and monitoring. With the help of this book, you'll get to grips with Spring 5 and Vue.js 2 as you learn how to develop a web application. From the initial structuring to full deployment, you’ll be guided at every step of developing a web application from scratch with Vue.js 2 and Spring 5. You’ll learn how to create different components of your application as you progress through each chapter, followed by exploring different tools in these frameworks to expedite your development cycle. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a complete understanding of the key design patterns and best practices that underpin professional full-stack web development.

Building Big Data Pipelines with Apache Beam. Use a single programming model for both batch and stream data processing

Jan Lukavský

Apache Beam is an open source unified programming model for implementing and executing data processing pipelines, including Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL), batch, and stream processing.This book will help you to confidently build data processing pipelines with Apache Beam. You’ll start with an overview of Apache Beam and understand how to use it to implement basic pipelines. You’ll also learn how to test and run the pipelines efficiently. As you progress, you’ll explore how to structure your code for reusability and also use various Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Later chapters will show you how to use schemas and query your data using (streaming) SQL. Finally, you’ll understand advanced Apache Beam concepts, such as implementing your own I/O connectors.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a deep understanding of the Apache Beam model and be able to apply it to solve problems.

Building Blazor WebAssembly Applications with gRPC. Learn how to implement source generators and gRPC in your Blazor apps for better performance

Václav Pekárek

Building Blazor WebAssembly Applications with gRPC will take you to the next level in your web development career. After working through all the essentials of gRPC, Blazor, and source generators, you will be far from a beginner C# developer and would qualify as a developer with intermediate knowledge of the Blazor ecosystem.After a quick primer on the basics of Blazor technology, REST, gRPC, and source generators, you’ll dive straight into building Blazor WASM applications. You’ll learn about everything from two-way bindings and Razor syntax to project setup. The practical emphasis continues throughout the book as you steam through creating data repositories, working with REST, and building and registering gRPC services. The chapters also cover how to manage source generators, C# and debugging best practices, and more. There is no shorter path than this book to solidify your gRPC-enabled web development knowledge.By the end of this book, your knowledge of building Blazor applications with one of the most modern and powerful frameworks around will equip you with a highly sought-after skill set that you can leverage in the best way possible.

Building Blockchain Projects. Building decentralized Blockchain applications with Ethereum and Solidity

Narayan Prusty

Blockchain is a decentralized ledger that maintains a continuously growing list of data records that are secured from tampering and revision. Every user is allowed to connectto the network, send new transactions to it, verify transactions, and create new blocks,making it permission-less.This book will teach you what blockchain is, how it maintains data integrity, and how to create real-world blockchain projects using Ethereum. With interesting real-worldprojects, you will learn how to write smart contracts which run exactly as programmedwithout any chance of fraud, censorship, or third-party interference, and build end-to-eapplications for blockchain.You will learn about concepts such as cryptography in cryptocurrencies, ether security, mining, smart contracts, solidity, and more. You will also learn about web sockets, various API services for Ethereum, and much more.The blockchain is the main technical innovation of bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for bitcoin transactions.

Building Bluetooth Low Energy Systems. Take your first steps in IoT

Muhammad Usama bin Aftab

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a Wireless Personal Area network technology aimed at novel applications for smart devices. High-tech BLE profiles and services are being increasingly used by application developers and hardware enthusiasts to allow devices to interact with the surrounding world.This book will focus on a technical introduction to BLE and how it is reshaping small-distance communication. We will start with IoT, where many technologies such as BLE, Zigbee, and IEEE 802.15.4 Mesh will be introduced. The book will present BLE from an engineering perspective, from which the protocol stack, architecture, and layers are discussed. You will learn to implement customized projects for Peripheral/Central communication, BLE Beacons, indoor navigation using triangulation, and the Internet gateway for Bluetooth Low Energy Personal Network, all using various code samples and APIs on Android, iOS, and the Web. Finally, the book will conclude with a glimpse into future technologies destined to be prominent in years to come.

Building Bots with Microsoft Bot Framework. Creating intelligent conversational interfaces

Kishore Gaddam

Bots help users to use the language as a UI and interact with the applications from any platform. This book teaches you how to develop real-world bots using Microsoft Bot Framework.The book starts with setting up the Microsoft Bot Framework development environment and emulator, and moves on to building the first bot using Connector and Builder SDK. Explore how to register, connect, test, and publish your bot to the Slack, Skype, and Facebook Messenger platforms. Throughout this book, you will build different types of bots from simple to complex, such as a weather bot, a natural speech and intent processing bot, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) bot for a bank, a facial expression recognition bot, and more from scratch. These bots were designed and developed to teach you concepts such as text detection, implementing LUIS dialogs, Cortana Intelligence Services, third-party authentication, Rich Text format, Bot State Service, and microServices so you can practice working with the standard development tools such as Visual Studio, Bot Emulator, and Azure.

Building Business Websites with Squarespace 7. Master the Squarespace platform to build professional websites that boost your businesses - Second Edition

Tiffanie Miko Coffey

Squarespace is a web-based tool that allows non-technical people to create and manage professional-looking websites quickly, without needing to write any code. It empowers business owners to take total control of their own websites, without needing to pay someone to design or maintain it.This book covers much more than just how to use Squarespace. It covers all aspects of creating a successful business website, from developing your brand identity, to writing and structuring content to match your target audience's needs, and dozens of other other valuable tips that will help your website shine. Most importantly, you'll learn the correct steps to follow in order to ensure your project is smooth and stress-free.The book starts by helping you plan your website project and gather all the raw materials you'll need. Next, you'll set up your account and become familiar with the terminology and tools that you'll be using. Once you've learned the basics of how the Squarespace interface, templates, and different page types operate, you will create the framework of your website, ready for you to insert content and functionality. Then, once all the core elements are in place, you'll apply the aesthetic fine-tuning needed to bring your website in line with your brand. After the aesthetics have been honed and all functions tested, you will launch your website and drive traffic to it, monitor it, and improve it.

Building Business Websites with Squarespace 7. Master the tools and techniques of using Squarespace to create professional websites

Tiffanie Miko Coffey, Miko Coffey

Building CI/CD Systems Using Tekton. Develop flexible and powerful CI/CD pipelines using Tekton Pipelines and Triggers

Joel Lord

Tekton is a powerful yet flexible Kubernetes-native open source framework for creating continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) systems. It enables you to build, test, and deploy across multiple cloud providers or on-premise systems.Building CI/CD Systems Using Tekton covers everything you need to know to start building your pipeline and automating application delivery in a cloud-native environment. Using a hands-on approach, you will learn about the basic building blocks, such as tasks, pipelines, and workspaces, which you can use to compose your CI/CD pipelines. As you progress, you will understand how to use these Tekton objects in conjunction with Tekton Triggers to automate the delivery of your application in a Kubernetes cluster.By the end of this book, you will have learned how to compose Tekton Pipelines and use them with Tekton Triggers to build powerful CI/CD systems.

Building CLI Applications with C# and .NET. A step-by-step guide to developing cross-platform CLI apps—from coding and testing to deployment

Tidjani Belmansour, Damian Brady

Developers and system administrators often face challenges like inefficient workflows, complex system operations, and the growing demand for robust automation tools. CLI applications provide a powerful solution by enhancing flexibility, efficiency, and productivity in various environments. This book will guide you through mastering the development of robust command-line tools using .NET.Written by a Microsoft Azure MVP, the book’s hands-on approach ensures practical experience with real-world projects. You’ll start with an overview of foundational principles, essential concepts, and best practices for CLI application development. From there, you’ll advance to creating interactive interfaces, integrating with external APIs and services, and implementing security measures to safeguard your applications. Each chapter will build progressively from basic to advanced topics.Beyond development, you’ll learn how to enhance application quality through testing, package for efficient distribution, and deploy effectively. The book also teaches strategies to optimize performance to ensure your applications run efficiently under heavy usage.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a deep understanding of CLI application development with .NET to build modular, extensible, and easy-to-maintain applications.

Building Clouds with Windows Azure Pack. Click here to enter text

Amit Malik

Windows Azure Pack is an on-premises cloud solution by Microsoft, which can be leveraged by Organizations and Services providers for building an enterprise class cloud solution. WAP provides consistent experience to Microsoft Azure, along with capabilities such as multi-tenancy, high density, self-service, automated. WAP can be leveraged to provide both IaaS & PaaS Offerings to internal and external customers. In this book, we will learn about planning and deployment of Cloud Fabric for Windows Azure Pack, Azure Pack components, VM Clouds and IaaS offerings, PaaS Offering including WebSites & Service Bus, DBaaS offerings, Automation with SMA, and extending capabilities with third party products integration and tenant experience for all services.

Building Computer Vision Projects with OpenCV 4 and C++. Implement complex computer vision algorithms and explore deep learning and face detection

David Millán Escrivá, Prateek Joshi, Vinícius G. Mendonça, Roy Shilkrot

OpenCV is one of the best open source libraries available and can help you focus on constructing complete projects on image processing, motion detection, and image segmentation.This Learning Path is your guide to understanding OpenCV concepts and algorithms through real-world examples and activities. Through various projects, you'll also discover how to use complex computer vision and machine learning algorithms and face detection to extract the maximum amount of information from images and videos. In later chapters, you'll learn to enhance your videos and images with optical flow analysis and background subtraction. Sections in the Learning Path will help you get to grips with text segmentation and recognition, in addition to guiding you through the basics of the new and improved deep learning modules. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have mastered commonly used computer vision techniques to build OpenCV projects from scratch. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books:•Mastering OpenCV 4 - Third Edition by Roy Shilkrot and David Millán Escrivá•Learn OpenCV 4 By Building Projects - Second Edition by David Millán Escrivá, Vinícius G. Mendonça, and Prateek Joshi

Building Cross-Platform GUI Applications with Fyne. Create beautiful, platform-agnostic graphical applications using Fyne and the Go programming language

Andrew Williams

The history of graphical application development is long and complicated, with various development challenges that persist to this day. The mix of technologies involved and the need to use different programming languages led to a very steep learning curve for developers looking to build applications across multiple platforms.In Building Cross-Platform GUI Applications with Fyne, you'll understand how the Go language, when paired with a modern graphical toolkit such as Fyne, can overcome these issues and make application development much easier. To provide an easy-to-use framework for cross-platform app development, the Fyne project offers many graphical concepts and design principles that are outlined throughout this book.By working through five example projects, you'll learn how to build apps effectively, focusing on each of the main areas, including the canvas, layouts, file handling, widgets, data binding, and themes. The book will also show you how the completed applications can then be run on your desktop computer, laptop, and smartphone. After completing these projects, you will discover how to prepare applications for release and distribute them to platform marketplaces and app stores.By the end of this book, you'll be able to create cross-platform graphical applications with visually appealing user interfaces and concise code.

Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Excel 2013. Microsoft Dynamics GP and Excel are made for each other. With this book you'll learn to use Excel to present the information contained in Dynamics in a data-rich dashboard. Step-by-step instructions come with real-life examples

Mark Polino

Accounting systems like Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 hold a wealth of information. Excel 2013 provides a great tool for linking to, extracting, analysing, and presenting that rich data to help companies make better, faster, and smarter decisions.Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Excel 2013 covers how to get the rich, detailed information contained in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and present it in an attractive, easy-to-understand way using Excel 2013. The book shows in detail how to build great-looking dashboards that enhance a company's decision-making process.This book shows you how to get at the rich, detailed information contained in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and present it in an attractive, easy-to-understand way using Excel 2013. This guide will take you from the basics of setup and deployment to creating secure, refreshable Excel reports. Using a whole host of tools available within Excel, this tutorial will show you how to visualize your data using simple conditional formatting techniques, easy-to-read charts, and allow you to make your data interactive with Slicers.Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Excel 2013 provides a way for you to easily build that interactive dashboard that your CFO keeps asking for.

Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016. Excel, Jet Reports, and MS Power BI with GP 2016 - Second Edition

Belinda Allen, Mark Polino

Microsoft Dynamics GP is a complete ERP solution that is extremely beneficial for small to midsize organizations in helping them grow exponentially.The book shows you in detail how to build great-looking dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP that enhance a company’s decision-making processes. This guide will take you from the basics of setting up and deploying to creating secure, refreshable Excel reports. Using a whole host of tools available within Microsoft Dynamics GP and Excel, this tutorial will show you how to visualize your data using simple conditional formatting techniques and easy-to-read charts, and allow you to make your data interactive with slicers. We will also cover core topics such as Business Analyzer, Microsoft SQL Reporting services reports, BI360, and more. You will find out to use Power BI, share and refresh data and dashboards in Power BI, and use Power BI Query Editor.By the end of this book, you will have all the information required to build interactive dashboards using Dynamics GP.

Building Data Science Applications with FastAPI. Develop, manage, and deploy efficient machine learning applications with Python

François Voron

FastAPI is a web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6 and its later versions based on standard Python-type hints. With this book, you’ll be able to create fast and reliable data science API backends using practical examples.This book starts with the basics of the FastAPI framework and associated modern Python programming language concepts. You'll be taken through all the aspects of the framework, including its powerful dependency injection system and how you can use it to communicate with databases, implement authentication and integrate machine learning models. Later, you’ll cover best practices relating to testing and deployment to run a high-quality and robust application. You’ll also be introduced to the extensive ecosystem of Python data science packages. As you progress, you’ll learn how to build data science applications in Python using FastAPI. The book also demonstrates how to develop fast and efficient machine learning prediction backends and test them to achieve the best performance. Finally, you’ll see how to implement a real-time face detection system using WebSockets and a web browser as a client.By the end of this FastAPI book, you’ll have not only learned how to implement Python in data science projects but also how to maintain and design them to meet high programming standards with the help of FastAPI.