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 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 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.

Building Data Streaming Applications with Apache Kafka. Design, develop and streamline applications using Apache Kafka, Storm, Heron and Spark

Chanchal Singh, Manish Kumar

Apache Kafka is a popular distributed streaming platform that acts as a messaging queue or an enterprise messaging system. It lets you publish and subscribe to a stream of records, and process them in a fault-tolerant way as they occur.This book is a comprehensive guide to designing and architecting enterprise-grade streaming applications using Apache Kafka and other big data tools. It includes best practices for building such applications, and tackles some common challenges such as how to use Kafka efficiently and handle high data volumes with ease. This book first takes you through understanding the type messaging system and then provides a thorough introduction to Apache Kafka and its internal details. The second part of the book takes you through designing streaming application using various frameworks and tools such as Apache Spark, Apache Storm, and more. Once you grasp the basics, we will take you through more advanced concepts in Apache Kafka such as capacity planning and security.By the end of this book, you will have all the information you need to be comfortable with using Apache Kafka, and to design efficient streaming data applications with it.

Building Data-Driven Applications with LlamaIndex. A practical guide to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to enhance LLM applications

Andrei Gheorghiu

Discover the immense potential of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) with this comprehensive guide. Learn to overcome LLM limitations, such as contextual memory constraints, prompt size issues, real-time data gaps, and occasional ‘hallucinations’. Follow practical examples to personalize and launch your LlamaIndex projects, mastering skills in ingesting, indexing, querying, and connecting dynamic knowledge bases. From fundamental LLM concepts to LlamaIndex deployment and customization, this book provides a holistic grasp of LlamaIndex's capabilities and applications. By the end, you'll be able to resolve LLM challenges and build interactive AI-driven applications using best practices in prompt engineering and troubleshooting Generative AI projects.

Building ERP Solutions with Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Solve business scenarios using NAV

Stefano Demiliani

Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV in the real world often requires you to integrate the ERP with external applications or solve complex architectural tasks in order to have a final successful project. This book will show you how to extend a Microsoft Dynamics NAV installation to the enterprise world in a practical way.The book starts with an introduction to Microsoft Dynamics NAV architecture and then moves on to advanced topics related to implementing real-world solutions based on NAV and external applications. You will learn how an enterprise distributed architecture with NAV at the core can be implemented. Through a series of real-world cases on every topic and every industry (sales, retail, manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, and so on), you’ll see step by step how to efficiently solve a technical problem. These common problems encountered in a NAV implementation will be solved using the entire technology stack that Microsoft offers.By the end of the book, you will have the knowledge to efficiently solve certain scenarios, you will know which is the best solution architecture to propose to a customer and how to implement it.

Building Google Cloud Platform Solutions. Develop scalable applications from scratch and make them globally available in almost any language

Ted Hunter, Steven Porter, Legorie Rajan PS

GCP is a cloud computing platform with a wide range of products and services that enable you to build and deploy cloud-hosted applications. This Learning Path will guide you in using GCP and designing, deploying, and managing applications on Google Cloud.You will get started by learning how to use App Engine to access Google's scalable hosting and build software that runs on this framework. With the help of Google Compute Engine, you’ll be able to host your workload on virtual machine instances. The later chapters will help you to explore ways to implement authentication and security, Cloud APIs, and command-line and deployment management. As you hone your skills, you’ll understand how to integrate your new applications with various data solutions on GCP, including Cloud SQL, Bigtable, and Cloud Storage. Following this, the book will teach you how to streamline your workflow with tools, including Source Repositories, Container Builder, and Stackdriver. You'll also understand how to deploy and debug services with IntelliJ, implement continuous delivery pipelines, and configure robust monitoring and alerts for your production systems. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be well versed with GCP’s development tools and be able to develop, deploy, and manage highly scalable and reliable applications.This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products:• Google Cloud Platform for Developers Ted Hunter and Steven Porter• Google Cloud Platform Cookbook by Legorie Rajan PS

Building Hybrid Clouds with Azure Stack. Implementing on-premises Azure infrastructure

Markus Klein, Susan Roesner

Azure Stack is all about creating fewer gaps between on-premise and public cloud application deployment. Azure Stack is the logical progression of Microsoft Cloud Services to create a true hybrid cloud-ready application.This book provides an introduction to Azure Stack and the cloud-first approach. Starting with an introduction to the architecture of Azure Stack, the book will help you plan and deploy your Azure Stack. Next, you will learn about the network and storage options in Azure Stack and you'll create your own private cloud solution. Finally, you will understand how to integrate public cloud using the third-party resource provider. After reading the book, you will have a good understanding of the end-to-end process of designing, offering, and supporting cloud solutions for enterprises or service providers.

Building Industrial Digital Twins. Design, develop, and deploy digital twin solutions for real-world industries using Azure Digital Twins

Shyam Varan Nath, Pieter van Schalkwyk, Dan Isaacs

Digital twin technology enables organizations to create digital representations of physical entities such as assets, systems, and processes throughout their life cycle. It improves asset performance, utilization, and safe operations and reduces manufacturing, operational, and maintenance costs.The book begins by introducing you to the concept of digital twins and sets you on a path to develop a digital twin strategy to positively influence business outcomes in your organization. You'll understand how digital twins relate to physical assets, processes, and technology and learn about the prerequisite conditions for the right platform, scale, and use case of your digital twins. You'll then get hands-on with Microsoft's Azure Digital Twins platform for your digital twin development and deployment. The book equips you with the knowledge to evaluate enterprise and specialty platforms, including the cloud and industrial IoT required to set up your digital twin prototype. Once you've built your prototype, you'll be able to test and validate it relative to the intended purpose of the twin through pilot deployment, full deployment, and value tracking techniques.By the end of this book, you'll have developed the skills to build and deploy your digital twin prototype, or minimum viable twin, to demonstrate, assess, and monitor your asset at specific stages in the asset life cycle.

Building Low Latency Applications with C++. Develop a complete low latency trading ecosystem from scratch using modern C++

Sourav Ghosh

C++ is meticulously designed with efficiency, performance, and flexibility as its core objectives. However, real-time low latency applications demand a distinct set of requirements, particularly in terms of performance latencies.With this book, you’ll gain insights into the performance requirements for low latency applications and the C++ features critical to achieving the required performance latencies. You’ll also solidify your understanding of the C++ principles and techniques as you build a low latency system in C++ from scratch.You’ll understand the similarities between such applications, recognize the impact of performance latencies on business, and grasp the reasons behind the extensive efforts invested in minimizing latencies. Using a step-by-step approach, you’ll embark on a low latency app development journey by building an entire electronic trading system, encompassing a matching engine, market data handlers, order gateways, and trading algorithms, all in C++. Additionally, you’ll get to grips with measuring and optimizing the performance of your trading system.By the end of this book, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of how to design and build low latency applications in C++ from the ground up, while effectively minimizing performance latencies.

Building Low-Code Applications with Mendix. Discover best practices and expert techniques to simplify enterprise web development

Bryan Kenneweg, Imran Kasam, Micah McMullen, Michael Guido

Low-code is a visual approach to application development. It enables developers of varying experience levels to create web and mobile apps using drag-and-drop components and model-driven logic through a graphic user interface. Mendix is among the fastest-growing platforms that enable low-code enthusiasts to put their software ideas into practice without having to write much code, and Building Low-Code Applications with Mendix will help you get up and running with the process using examples and practice projects.The book starts with an introduction to Mendix, along with the reasons for using this platform and its tools for creating your first app. As you progress, you’ll explore Mendix Studio Pro, the visual environment that will help you learn Mendix app creation. Once you have your working app ready, you’ll understand how to enhance it with custom business logic and rules. Next, you’ll find out how to defend your app against bad data, troubleshoot and debug it, and finally, connect it with real-world business platforms. You’ll build practical skills as the book is filled with examples, real-world scenarios, and explanations of the tools needed to help you build low-code apps successfully.By the end of this book, you’ll have understood the concept of low-code development, learned how to use Mendix effectively, and developed a working app.