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.