Building a 3D Game with LibGDX. Click here to enter text

Sebastián Di Giuseppe, Andreas Krühlmann, Elmar van Rijnswou

LibGDX is a hugely popular open source, cross-platform, Java-based game development framework built for the demands of cross-platform game development. This book will teach readers how the LibGDX framework uses its 3D rendering API with the OpenGL wrapper, in combination with Bullet Physics, 3D Particles, and Shaders to develop and deploy a game application to different platformsYou will start off with the basic Intellij environment, workflow and set up a LibGDX project with necessary APIs for 3D development. You will then go through LibGDX’s 3D rendering API main features and talk about the camera used for 3D. Our next step is to put everything together to build a basic 3D game with Shapes, including basic gameplay mechanics and basic UI. Next you will go through modeling, rigging, and animation in Blender. We will then talk about refining mechanics, new input implementations, implementing enemy 3D models, mechanics, and gameplay balancing. The later part of this title will help you to manage secondary resources like audio, music and add 3D particles in the game to make the game more realistic. You will finally test and deploy the app on a multitude of different platforms, ready to start developing your own titles how you want!

Building a Web Application with PHP and MariaDB: A Reference Guide. Build fast, secure, and interactive web applications using this comprehensive guide

Sai S Sriparasa

Building AI Applications with Microsoft Semantic Kernel. Easily integrate generative AI capabilities and copilot experiences into your applications

Lucas A. Meyer

In the fast-paced world of AI, developers are constantly seeking efficient ways to integrate AI capabilities into their apps. Microsoft Semantic Kernel simplifies this process by using the GenAI features from Microsoft and OpenAI.Written by Lucas A. Meyer, a Principal Research Scientist in Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, this book helps you get hands on with Semantic Kernel. It begins by introducing you to different generative AI services such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, demonstrating their integration with Semantic Kernel. You’ll then learn to craft prompt templates for reuse across various AI services and variables. Next, you’ll learn how to add functionality to Semantic Kernel by creating your own plugins. The second part of the book shows you how to combine multiple plugins to execute complex actions, and how to let Semantic Kernel use its own AI to solve complex problems by calling plugins, including the ones made by you. The book concludes by teaching you how to use vector databases to expand the memory of your AI services and how to help AI remember the context of earlier requests. You’ll also be guided through several real-world examples of applications, such as RAG and custom GPT agents.By the end of this book, you'll have gained the knowledge you need to start using Semantic Kernel to add AI capabilities to your applications.

Building AI Applications with OpenAI APIs. Leverage ChatGPT, Whisper, and DALL-E APIs to build 10 innovative AI projects - Second Edition

Martin Yanev

Unlock the power of AI in your applications with ChatGPT with this practical guide that shows you how to seamlessly integrate OpenAI APIs into your projects, enabling you to navigate complex APIs and ensure seamless functionality with ease.This new edition is updated with key topics such as OpenAI Embeddings, which’ll help you understand the semantic relationships between words and phrases. You’ll find out how to use ChatGPT, Whisper, and DALL-E APIs through 10 AI projects using the latest OpenAI models, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4, with Visual Studio Code as the IDE. Within these projects, you’ll integrate ChatGPT with frameworks and tools such as Flask, Django, Microsoft Office APIs, and PyQt. You’ll get to grips with NLP tasks, build a ChatGPT clone, and create an AI code bug-fixing SaaS app. The chapters will also take you through speech recognition, text-to-speech capabilities, language translation, generating email replies, creating PowerPoint presentations, and fine-tuning ChatGPT, along with adding payment methods by integrating the ChatGPT API with Stripe.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to develop, deploy, and monetize your own groundbreaking applications by harnessing the full potential of ChatGPT APIs.

Building AI Intensive Python Applications. Create intelligent apps with LLMs and vector databases

Rachelle Palmer, Ben Perlmutter, Ashwin Gangadhar, Nicholas Larew, ...

The era of generative AI is upon us, and this book serves as a roadmap to harness its full potential. With its help, you’ll learn the core components of the AI stack: large language models (LLMs), vector databases, and Python frameworks, and see how these technologies work together to create intelligent applications.The chapters will help you discover best practices for data preparation, model selection, and fine-tuning, and teach you advanced techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to overcome common challenges, such as hallucinations and data leakage. You’ll get a solid understanding of vector databases, implement effective vector search strategies, refine models for accuracy, and optimize performance to achieve impactful results. You’ll also identify and address AI failures to ensure your applications deliver reliable and valuable results. By evaluating and improving the output of LLMs, you’ll be able to enhance their performance and relevance.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to build sophisticated AI applications that deliver real-world value.

Building an API Product. Design, implement, release, and maintain API products that meet user needs

Bruno Pedro

The exponential increase in the number of APIs is evidence of their widespread adoption by companies seeking to deliver value to users across diverse industries, making the art of building successful APIs an invaluable skill for anyone involved in product development. With this comprehensive guide, you’ll walk through the entire process of planning, designing, implementing, releasing, and maintaining successful API products. You’ll start by exploring all aspects of APIs, including their types, technologies, protocols, and lifecycle stages. Next, you’ll learn how to define an API strategy and identify business objectives, user personas, and jobs-to-be-done (JTBD). With these skills, you’ll delve into designing and validating API capabilities to create a machine-readable API definition. As you advance, the book helps you understand how to choose the right language and framework for securely releasing an API server and offers insights into analyzing API usage metrics, improving performance, and creating compelling documentation that users love. Finally, you’ll discover ways to support users, manage versions, and communicate changes or the retirement of an API.By the end of this API development book, you’ll have the confidence and skills to create API products that truly stand out in the market.

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 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 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 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 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.