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.