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.

Hands-On Cloud-Native Applications with Java and Quarkus. Build high performance, Kubernetes-native Java serverless applications

Francesco Marchioni, Mark Little

Quarkus is a new Kubernetes-native framework that allows Java developers to combine the power of containers, microservices, and cloud-native to build reliable applications. The book is a development guide that will teach you how to build Java-native applications using Quarkus and GraalVM.We start by learning about the basic concepts of a cloud-native application and its advantages over standard enterprise applications. Then we will quickly move on to application development, by installing the tooling required to build our first application on Quarkus. Next, we’ll learn how to create a container-native image of our application and execute it in a Platform-as-a-Service environment such as Minishift. Later, we will build a complete real-world application that will use REST and the Contexts and Dependency injection stack with a web frontend. We will also learn how to add database persistence to our application using PostgreSQL. We will learn how to work with various APIs available to?Quarkus?such as Camel, Eclipse MicroProfile, and Spring DI. Towards the end, we will learn advanced development techniques such as securing applications, application configuration, and working with non-blocking programming models using Vert.x.By the end of this book, you will be proficient with all the components of Quarkus and develop-blazing fast applications leveraging modern technology infrastructure.

Hands-On Cloud-Native Microservices with Jakarta EE. Build scalable and reactive microservices with Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift

Luigi Fugaro, Mauro Vocale

Businesses today are evolving rapidly, and developers now face the challenge of building applications that are resilient, flexible, and native to the cloud. To achieve this, you'll need to be aware of the environment, tools, and resources that you're coding against. The book will begin by introducing you to cloud-native architecture and simplifying the major concepts. You'll learn to build microservices in Jakarta EE using MicroProfile with Thorntail and Narayana LRA. You'll then delve into cloud-native application x-rays, understanding the MicroProfile specification and the implementation/testing of microservices. As you progress further, you'll focus on continuous integration and continuous delivery, in addition to learning how to dockerize your services. You'll also cover concepts and techniques relating to security, monitoring, and troubleshooting problems that might occur with applications after you've written them.By the end of this book, you will be equipped with the skills you need to build highly resilient applications using cloud-native microservice architecture.

Hands-On Computer Vision with Detectron2. Develop object detection and segmentation models with a code and visualization approach

Van Vung Pham, Tommy Dang

Computer vision is a crucial component of many modern businesses, including automobiles, robotics, and manufacturing, and its market is growing rapidly. This book helps you explore Detectron2, Facebook's next-gen library providing cutting-edge detection and segmentation algorithms. It’s used in research and practical projects at Facebook to support computer vision tasks, and its models can be exported to TorchScript or ONNX for deployment.The book provides you with step-by-step guidance on using existing models in Detectron2 for computer vision tasks (object detection, instance segmentation, key-point detection, semantic detection, and panoptic segmentation). You’ll get to grips with the theories and visualizations of Detectron2’s architecture and learn how each module in Detectron2 works. As you advance, you’ll build your practical skills by working on two real-life projects (preparing data, training models, fine-tuning models, and deployments) for object detection and instance segmentation tasks using Detectron2. Finally, you’ll deploy Detectron2 models into production and develop Detectron2 applications for mobile devices.By the end of this deep learning book, you’ll have gained sound theoretical knowledge and useful hands-on skills to help you solve advanced computer vision tasks using Detectron2.

Hands-On Computer Vision with Julia. Build complex applications with advanced Julia packages for image processing, neural networks, and Artificial Intelligence

Dmitrijs Cudihins

Hands-On Computer Vision with Julia is a thorough guide for developers who want to get started with building computer vision applications using Julia. Julia is well suited to image processing because it’s easy to use and lets you write easy-to-compile and efficient machine code..This book begins by introducing you to Julia's image processing libraries such as Images.jl and ImageCore.jl. You’ll get to grips with analyzing and transforming images using JuliaImages; some of the techniques discussed include enhancing and adjusting images. As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll learn how to classify images, cluster them, and apply neural networks to solve computer vision problems. In the concluding chapters, you will explore OpenCV applications to perform real-time computer vision analysis, for example, face detection and object tracking. You will also understand Julia's interaction with Tesseract to perform optical character recognition and build an application that brings together all the techniques we introduced previously to consolidate the concepts learned.By end of the book, you will have understood how to utilize various Julia packages and a few open source libraries such as Tesseract and OpenCV to solve computer vision problems with ease.

Hands-On Computer Vision with TensorFlow 2. Leverage deep learning to create powerful image processing apps with TensorFlow 2.0 and Keras

Benjamin Planche, Eliot Andres

Computer vision solutions are becoming increasingly common, making their way into fields such as health, automobile, social media, and robotics. This book will help you explore TensorFlow 2, the brand new version of Google's open source framework for machine learning. You will understand how to benefit from using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for visual tasks.Hands-On Computer Vision with TensorFlow 2 starts with the fundamentals of computer vision and deep learning, teaching you how to build a neural network from scratch. You will discover the features that have made TensorFlow the most widely used AI library, along with its intuitive Keras interface. You'll then move on to building, training, and deploying CNNs efficiently. Complete with concrete code examples, the book demonstrates how to classify images with modern solutions, such as Inception and ResNet, and extract specific content using You Only Look Once (YOLO), Mask R-CNN, and U-Net. You will also build generative adversarial networks (GANs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs) to create and edit images, and long short-term memory networks (LSTMs) to analyze videos. In the process, you will acquire advanced insights into transfer learning, data augmentation, domain adaptation, and mobile and web deployment, among other key concepts.By the end of the book, you will have both the theoretical understanding and practical skills to solve advanced computer vision problems with TensorFlow 2.0.

Hands-On Concurrency with Rust. Confidently build memory-safe, parallel, and efficient software in Rust

Brian L. Troutwine

Most programming languages can really complicate things, especially with regard to unsafe memory access. The burden on you, the programmer, lies across two domains: understanding the modern machine and your language's pain-points. This book will teach you to how to manage program performance on modern machines and build fast, memory-safe, and concurrent software in Rust. It starts with the fundamentals of Rust and discusses machine architecture concepts. You will be taken through ways to measure and improve the performance of Rust code systematically and how to write collections with confidence. You will learn about the Sync and Send traits applied to threads, and coordinate thread execution with locks, atomic primitives, data-parallelism, and more.The book will show you how to efficiently embed Rust in C++ code and explore the functionalities of various crates for multithreaded applications. It explores implementations in depth. You will know how a mutex works and build several yourself. You will master radically different approaches that exist in the ecosystem for structuring and managing high-scale systems. By the end of the book, you will feel comfortable with designing safe, consistent, parallel, and high-performance applications in Rust.

Hands-On Continuous Integration and Delivery. Build and release quality software at scale with Jenkins, Travis CI, and CircleCI

Jean-Marcel Belmont

Hands-On Continuous Integration and Delivery starts with the fundamentals of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) and where it fits in the DevOps ecosystem. You will explore the importance of stakeholder collaboration as part of CI/CD.As you make your way through the chapters, you will get to grips with Jenkins UI, and learn to install Jenkins on different platforms, add plugins, and write freestyle scripts. Next, you will gain hands-on experience of developing plugins with Jenkins UI, building the Jenkins 2.0 pipeline, and performing Docker integration. In the concluding chapters, you will install Travis CI and Circle CI and carry out scripting, logging, and debugging, helping you to acquire a broad knowledge of CI/CD with Travis CI and CircleCI.By the end of this book, you will have a detailed understanding of best practices for CI/CD systems and be able to implement them with confidence.

Hands-On Convolutional Neural Networks with TensorFlow. Solve computer vision problems with modeling in TensorFlow and Python

Iffat Zafar, Giounona Tzanidou, Richard Burton, Nimesh Patel, ...

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are one of the most popular architectures used in computer vision apps. This book is an introduction to CNNs through solving real-world problems in deep learning while teaching you their implementation in popular Python library - TensorFlow. By the end of the book, you will be training CNNs in no time!We start with an overview of popular machine learning and deep learning models, and then get you set up with a TensorFlow development environment. This environment is the basis for implementing and training deep learning models in later chapters. Then, you will use Convolutional Neural Networks to work on problems such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation.After that, you will use transfer learning to see how these models can solve other deep learning problems. You will also get a taste of implementing generative models such as autoencoders and generative adversarial networks.Later on, you will see useful tips on machine learning best practices and troubleshooting. Finally, you will learn how to apply your models on large datasets of millions of images.

Hands-On Cryptography with Python. Leverage the power of Python to encrypt and decrypt data

Samuel Bowne

Cryptography is essential for protecting sensitive information, but it is often performed inadequately or incorrectly. Hands-On Cryptography with Python starts by showing you how to encrypt and evaluate your data. The book will then walk you through various data encryption methods,such as obfuscation, hashing, and strong encryption, and will show how you can attack cryptographic systems. You will learn how to create hashes, crack them, and will understand why they are so different from each other. In the concluding chapters, you will use three NIST-recommended systems: the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA), and the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA). By the end of this book, you will be able to deal with common errors in encryption.

Hands-On Cybersecurity for Finance. Identify vulnerabilities and secure your financial services from security breaches

Dr. Erdal Ozkaya, Milad Aslaner

Organizations have always been a target of cybercrime. Hands-On Cybersecurity for Finance teaches you how to successfully defend your system against common cyber threats, making sure your financial services are a step ahead in terms of security.The book begins by providing an overall description of cybersecurity, guiding you through some of the most important services and technologies currently at risk from cyber threats. Once you have familiarized yourself with the topic, you will explore specific technologies and threats based on case studies and real-life scenarios. As you progress through the chapters, you will discover vulnerabilities and bugs (including the human risk factor), gaining an expert-level view of the most recent threats. You'll then explore information on how you can achieve data and infrastructure protection. In the concluding chapters, you will cover recent and significant updates to procedures and configurations, accompanied by important details related to cybersecurity research and development in IT-based financial services.By the end of the book, you will have gained a basic understanding of the future of information security and will be able to protect financial services and their related infrastructures.

Hands-On Cybersecurity with Blockchain. Implement DDoS protection, PKI-based identity, 2FA, and DNS security using Blockchain

Rajneesh Gupta

Blockchain technology is being welcomed as one of the most revolutionary and impactful innovations of today. Blockchain technology was first identified in the world’s most popular digital currency, Bitcoin, but has now changed the outlook of several organizations and empowered them to use it even for storage and transfer of value.This book will start by introducing you to the common cyberthreat landscape and common attacks such as malware, phishing, insider threats, and DDoS. The next set of chapters will help you to understand the workings of Blockchain technology, Ethereum and Hyperledger architecture and how they fit into the cybersecurity ecosystem. These chapters will also help you to write your first distributed application on Ethereum Blockchain and the Hyperledger Fabric framework. Later, you will learn about the security triad and its adaptation with Blockchain. The last set of chapters will take you through the core concepts of cybersecurity, such as DDoS protection, PKI-based identity, 2FA, and DNS security. You will learn how Blockchain plays a crucial role in transforming cybersecurity solutions.Toward the end of the book, you will also encounter some real-world deployment examples of Blockchain in security cases, and also understand the short-term challenges and future of cybersecurity with Blockchain.

Hands-On Dark Web Analysis. Learn what goes on in the Dark Web, and how to work with it

Sion Retzkin

The overall world wide web is divided into three main areas - the Surface Web, the Deep Web, and the Dark Web. The Deep Web and Dark Web are the two areas which are not accessible through standard search engines or browsers. It becomes extremely important for security professionals to have control over these areas to analyze the security of your organization.This book will initially introduce you to the concept of the Deep Web and the Dark Web and their significance in the security sector. Then we will deep dive into installing operating systems and Tor Browser for privacy, security and anonymity while accessing them. During the course of the book, we will also share some best practices which will be useful in using the tools for best effect.By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience working with the Deep Web and the Dark Web for security analysis

Hands-On Dashboard Development with QlikView. Practical guide to creating interactive and user-friendly business intelligence dashboards

Abhishek Agarwal

QlikView is one of the market leaders when it comes to building effective Business Intelligence solutions. This book will show how you can leverage its power to build your own dashboards to tell your own data story.The book starts with showing you how to connect your data to QlikView and create your own QlikView application. You will learn how to add data from multiple sources, create a data model by joining data, and then review it on the front end. You will work with QlikView components such as charts, list boxes, input boxes, and text objects to create stunning visualizations that help give actionable business insights. You will also learn how to perform analysis on your data in QlikView and master the various types of security measures to be taken in QlikView.By the end of this book, you will have all the essential knowledge required for insightful data storytelling and creating useful BI dashboards using QlikView.

Hands-On Dashboard Development with Shiny. A practical guide to building effective web applications and dashboards

Chris Beeley

Although vanilla Shiny applications look attractive with some layout flexibility, you may still want to have more control over how the interface is laid out to produce a dashboard. Hands-On Dashboard Development with Shiny helps you incorporate this in your applications.The book starts by guiding you in producing an application based on the diamonds dataset included in the ggplot2 package. You’ll create a single application, but the interface will be reskinned and rebuilt throughout using different methods to illustrate their uses and functions using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You will also learn to develop an application that creates documents and reports using R Markdown. Furthermore, the book demonstrates the use of HTML templates and the Bootstrap framework. Moving along, you will learn how to produce dashboards using the Shiny command and dashboard package. Finally, you will learn how to lay out applications using a wide range of built-in functions.By the end of the book, you will have an understanding of the principles that underpin layout in Shiny applications, including sections of HTML added to a vanilla Shiny application, HTML interfaces written from scratch, dashboards, navigation bars, and interfaces.

Hands-On Data Analysis with NumPy and Pandas. Implement Python packages from data manipulation to processing

Curtis Miller

Python, a multi-paradigm programming language, has become the language of choice for data scientists for visualization, data analysis, and machine learning.Hands-On Data Analysis with NumPy and Pandas starts by guiding you in setting up the right environment for data analysis with Python, along with helping you install the correct Python distribution. In addition to this, you will work with the Jupyter notebook and set up a database. Once you have covered Jupyter, you will dig deep into Python’s NumPy package, a powerful extension with advanced mathematical functions. You will then move on to creating NumPy arrays and employing different array methods and functions. You will explore Python’s pandas extension which will help you get to grips with data mining and learn to subset your data. Last but not the least you will grasp how to manage your datasets by sorting and ranking them. By the end of this book, you will have learned to index and group your data for sophisticated data analysis and manipulation.

Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas. A Python data science handbook for data collection, wrangling, analysis, and visualization - Second Edition

Stefanie Molin, Ken Jee

Extracting valuable business insights is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’, but an essential skill for anyone who handles data in their enterprise. Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas is here to help beginners and those who are migrating their skills into data science get up to speed in no time.This book will show you how to analyze your data, get started with machine learning, and work effectively with the Python libraries often used for data science, such as pandas, NumPy, matplotlib, seaborn, and scikit-learn.Using real-world datasets, you will learn how to use the pandas library to perform data wrangling to reshape, clean, and aggregate your data. Then, you will learn how to conduct exploratory data analysis by calculating summary statistics and visualizing the data to find patterns. In the concluding chapters, you will explore some applications of anomaly detection, regression, clustering, and classification using scikit-learn to make predictions based on past data.This updated edition will equip you with the skills you need to use pandas 1.x to efficiently perform various data manipulation tasks, reliably reproduce analyses, and visualize your data for effective decision making – valuable knowledge that can be applied across multiple domains.

Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas. Efficiently perform data collection, wrangling, analysis, and visualization using Python

Stefanie Molin

Data analysis has become a necessary skill in a variety of domains where knowing how to work with data and extract insights can generate significant value.Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas will show you how to analyze your data, get started with machine learning, and work effectively with Python libraries often used for data science, such as pandas, NumPy, matplotlib, seaborn, and scikit-learn. Using real-world datasets, you will learn how to use the powerful pandas library to perform data wrangling to reshape, clean, and aggregate your data. Then, you will be able to conduct exploratory data analysis by calculating summary statistics and visualizing the data to find patterns. In the concluding chapters, you will explore some applications of anomaly detection, regression, clustering, and classification using scikit-learn to make predictions based on past data.By the end of this book, you will be equipped with the skills you need to use pandas to ensure the veracity of your data, visualize it for effective decision-making, and reliably reproduce analyses across multiple datasets.

Hands-On Data Analysis with Scala. Perform data collection, processing, manipulation, and visualization with Scala

Rajesh Gupta

Efficient business decisions with an accurate sense of business data helps in delivering better performance across products and services. This book helps you to leverage the popular Scala libraries and tools for performing core data analysis tasks with ease.The book begins with a quick overview of the building blocks of a standard data analysis process. You will learn to perform basic tasks like Extraction, Staging, Validation, Cleaning, and Shaping of datasets. You will later deep dive into the data exploration and visualization areas of the data analysis life cycle. You will make use of popular Scala libraries like Saddle, Breeze, Vegas, and PredictionIO for processing your datasets. You will learn statistical methods for deriving meaningful insights from data. You will also learn to create applications for Apache Spark 2.x on complex data analysis, in real-time. You will discover traditional machine learning techniques for doing data analysis. Furthermore, you will also be introduced to neural networks and deep learning from a data analysis standpoint.By the end of this book, you will be capable of handling large sets of structured and unstructured data, perform exploratory analysis, and building efficient Scala applications for discovering and delivering insights