Blockchain for Business 2019. A user-friendly introduction to blockchain technology and its business applications

Peter Lipovyanov

Blockchain for Business 2019 is a comprehensive guide that enables you to bring in various blockchain functionalities to extend your existing business models and make correct fully-informed decisions. You will learn how decentralized applications are transforming numerous business sectors that are expected to play a huge role in the future. You will see how large corporations are already implementing blockchain technology now. You will then learn about the various blockchain services, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger, and others to understand their use cases in a variety of business domains. You will develop a solid fundamental understanding of blockchain architecture. Moving ahead, you will get to grips with the inner workings of blockchain, with detailed explanations of mining, decentralized consensus, cryptography, smart contracts, and many other important concepts. You will delve into a realistic view of the current state of blockchain technology, along with its issues, limitations, and potential solutions that can take it to the next level.By the end of this book, you will all be well versed in the latest innovations and developments in the emerging blockchain space.

Blockchain for Enterprise. Build scalable blockchain applications with privacy, interoperability, and permissioned features

Narayan Prusty

The increasing growth in blockchain use is enormous, and it is changing the way business is done. Many leading organizations are already exploring the potential of blockchain. With this book, you will learn to build end-to-end enterprise-level decentralized applications and scale them across your organization to meet your company's needs. This book will help you understand what DApps are and how the blockchain ecosystem works, via real-world examples. This extensive end-to-end book covers every blockchain aspect for business and for developers. You will master process flows and incorporate them into your own enterprise. You will learn how to use J.P. Morgan’s Quorum to build blockchain-based applications. You will also learn how to write applications that can help communicate enterprise blockchain solutions. You will learn how to write smart contracts that run without censorship and third-party interference.Once you've grasped what a blockchain is and have learned about Quorum, you will jump into building real-world practical blockchain applications for sectors such as payment and money transfer, healthcare, cloud computing, supply chain management, and much more.

Blockchain Quick Reference. A guide to exploring decentralized blockchain application development

Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt

Blockchain Quick Reference takes you through the electrifying world of blockchain technology and is designed for those who want to polish their existing knowledge regarding the various pillars of the blockchain ecosystem.This book is your go-to guide, teaching you how to apply principles and ideas for making your life and business better. You will cover the architecture, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), tokens, smart contracts, and terminologies of the blockchain technology, before studying how they work. All you need is a curious mind to get started with blockchain technology. Once you have grasped the basics, you will explore components of Ethereum, such as ether tokens, transactions, and smart contracts, in order to build simple Dapps. You will then move on to learning why Solidity is used specifically for Ethereum-based projects, followed by exploring different types of blockchain with easy-to-follow examples. All this will help you tackle challenges and problems. By the end of this book, you will not only have solved current and future problems relating to blockchain technology but will also be able to build efficient decentralized applications.

Blockchain Quick Start Guide. A beginner's guide to developing enterprise-grade decentralized applications

Xun (Brian) Wu, Weimin Sun

Blockchain is a technology that powers the development of decentralized applications.This technology allows the construction of a network with no single control that enables participants to make contributions to and receive benefits from the network directly.This book will give you a thorough overview of blockchain and explain how a blockchain works.You will begin by going through various blockchain consensus mechanisms and cryptographic hash functions. You will then learn the fundamentals of programming in Solidity – the defacto language for developing decentralize, applications in Ethereum. After that, you will set up an Ethereum development environment and develop, package, build, and test campaign-decentralized applications.The book also shows you how to set up Hyperledger composer tools, analyze business scenarios, design business models, and write a chain code. Finally, you will get a glimpse of how blockchain is actually used in different real-world domains. By the end of this guide, you will be comfortable working with basic blockchain frameworks, and develop secure, decentralized applications in a hassle-free manner.

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 Blockchain Projects. Building decentralized Blockchain applications with Ethereum and Solidity

Narayan Prusty

Blockchain is a decentralized ledger that maintains a continuously growing list of data records that are secured from tampering and revision. Every user is allowed to connectto the network, send new transactions to it, verify transactions, and create new blocks,making it permission-less.This book will teach you what blockchain is, how it maintains data integrity, and how to create real-world blockchain projects using Ethereum. With interesting real-worldprojects, you will learn how to write smart contracts which run exactly as programmedwithout any chance of fraud, censorship, or third-party interference, and build end-to-eapplications for blockchain.You will learn about concepts such as cryptography in cryptocurrencies, ether security, mining, smart contracts, solidity, and more. You will also learn about web sockets, various API services for Ethereum, and much more.The blockchain is the main technical innovation of bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for bitcoin transactions.

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 Danfo.js. A practical guide to data analysis and machine learning using JavaScript

Rising Odegua, Stephen Oni

Most data analysts use Python and pandas for data processing for the convenience and performance these libraries provide. However, JavaScript developers have always wanted to use machine learning in the browser as well. This book focuses on how Danfo.js brings data processing, analysis, and ML tools to JavaScript developers and how to make the most of this library to build data-driven applications.Starting with an overview of modern JavaScript, you’ll cover data analysis and transformation with Danfo.js and Dnotebook. The book then shows you how to load different datasets, combine and analyze them by performing operations such as handling missing values and string manipulations. You’ll also get to grips with data plotting, visualization, aggregation, and group operations by combining Danfo.js with Plotly. As you advance, you’ll create a no-code data analysis and handling system and create-react-app, react-table, react-chart, Draggable.js, and tailwindcss, and understand how to use TensorFlow.js and Danfo.js to build a recommendation system. Finally, you’ll build a Twitter analytics dashboard powered by Danfo.js, Next.js, node-nlp, and Twit.js.By the end of this app development book, you’ll be able to build and embed data analytics, visualization, and ML capabilities into any JavaScript app in server-side Node.js or the browser.

Building ETL Pipelines with Python. Create and deploy enterprise-ready ETL pipelines by employing modern methods

Brij Kishore Pandey, Emily Ro Schoof

Modern extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines for data engineering have favored the Python language for its broad range of uses and a large assortment of tools, applications, and open source components. With its simplicity and extensive library support, Python has emerged as the undisputed choice for data processing.In this book, you’ll walk through the end-to-end process of ETL data pipeline development, starting with an introduction to the fundamentals of data pipelines and establishing a Python development environment to create pipelines. Once you've explored the ETL pipeline design principles and ET development process, you'll be equipped to design custom ETL pipelines. Next, you'll get to grips with the steps in the ETL process, which involves extracting valuable data; performing transformations, through cleaning, manipulation, and ensuring data integrity; and ultimately loading the processed data into storage systems. You’ll also review several ETL modules in Python, comparing their pros and cons when building data pipelines and leveraging cloud tools, such as AWS, to create scalable data pipelines. Lastly, you’ll learn about the concept of test-driven development for ETL pipelines to ensure safe deployments.By the end of this book, you’ll have worked on several hands-on examples to create high-performance ETL pipelines to develop robust, scalable, and resilient environments using Python.

Building Interactive Dashboards in Microsoft 365 Excel. Harness the new features and formulae in M365 Excel to create dynamic, automated dashboards

Michael Olafusi, Olanrewaju Oyinbooke

M365 Excel is a modern Excel version that is constantly updated with features that make creating and automating analyses, reports, and dashboards very easy compared with older Excel versions. This book will help you leverage its full capabilities, beginning with a quick overview of what dashboards are and how they are different from other types of reports. Then, you’ll familiarize yourself with the different standard dashboards currently available and what they are meant to accomplish for organizations. As you progress, you’ll get to grips with the use of new powerful tools such as Power Query and dynamic array formulae in the automation of analysis, gaining insights into the right approach to take in building effective dashboards. You’ll equip yourself with not only all the essential formulae, charts, and non-chart visuals but also learn how to set up your dashboard perfectly. Along the way, you’ll build a couple of awesome dashboards from scratch to utilize your newfound knowledge.By the end of this book, you will be able to carry out an impressive and robust level of analysis on business data that may come from multiple sources or files, using better processes, formulae, and best practices in M365 to create insightful dashboards faster.

Building Machine Learning Systems with Python. Expand your Python knowledge and learn all about machine-learning libraries in this user-friendly manual. ML is the next big breakthrough in technology and this book will give you the head-start you need

Willi Richert, Luis Pedro Coelho

Machine learning, the field of building systems that learn from data, is exploding on the Web and elsewhere. Python is a wonderful language in which to develop machine learning applications. As a dynamic language, it allows for fast exploration and experimentation and an increasing number of machine learning libraries are developed for Python.Building Machine Learning system with Python shows you exactly how to find patterns through raw data. The book starts by brushing up on your Python ML knowledge and introducing libraries, and then moves on to more serious projects on datasets, Modelling, Recommendations, improving recommendations through examples and sailing through sound and image processing in detail. Using open-source tools and libraries, readers will learn how to apply methods to text, images, and sounds. You will also learn how to evaluate, compare, and choose machine learning techniques. Written for Python programmers, Building Machine Learning Systems with Python teaches you how to use open-source libraries to solve real problems with machine learning. The book is based on real-world examples that the user can build on.Readers will learn how to write programs that classify the quality of StackOverflow answers or whether a music file is Jazz or Metal. They will learn regression, which is demonstrated on how to recommend movies to users. Advanced topics such as topic modeling (finding a text's most important topics), basket analysis, and cloud computing are covered as well as many other interesting aspects.Building Machine Learning Systems with Python will give you the tools and understanding required to build your own systems, which are tailored to solve your problems.

Building Web and Mobile ArcGIS Server Applications with JavaScript. Build exciting custom web and mobile GIS applications with the ArcGIS Server API for JavaScript - Second Edition

Eric Pimpler, Mark Lewin

The ArcGIS API for JavaScript enables you to quickly build web and mobile mapping applications that include sophisticated GIS capabilities, yet are easy and intuitive for the user.Aimed at both new and experienced web developers, this practical guide gives you everything you need to get started with the API. After a brief introduction to HTML/CSS/JavaScript, you'll embed maps in a web page, add the tiled, dynamic, and streaming data layers that your users will interact with, and mark up the map with graphics. You will learn how to quickly incorporate a broad range of useful user interface elements and GIS functionality to your application with minimal effort using prebuilt widgets. As the book progresses, you will discover and use the task framework to query layers with spatial and attribute criteria, search for and identify features on the map, geocode addresses, perform network analysis and routing, and add custom geoprocessing operations. Along the way, we cover exciting new features such as the client-side geometry engine, learn how to integrate content from ArcGIS.com, and use your new skills to build mobile web mapping applications.We conclude with a look at version 4 of the ArcGIS API for JavaScript (which is being developed in parallel with version 3.x) and what it means for you as a developer.

Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook. Over 90 practical, hands-on recipes to help you build your MicroStrategy business intelligence project, including more than a 100 screencasts with this book and

Davide Moraschi

Business intelligence is becoming more important by the day, with cloud offerings and mobile devices gaining wider acceptance and achieving better market penetration. MicroStrategy Reporting Suite is a complete business intelligence platform that covers all the data analysis needs of an enterprise. Scorecards, dashboards, and reports can be explored and delivered on desktop, the Web, mobile devices, and the Cloud. With the latest Visual Insight tool, MicroStrategy brings the power of BI to the business users, allowing them to discover information without the help of IT personnel.Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook covers the full cycle of a BI project with the MicroStrategy platform, from setting up the software to using dashboards in the cloud and on mobile devices. This book uses step-by-step instructions to teach you everything from the very basics to the more advanced topics. We will start by downloading and installing the software and a well-known sample SQL Server database. Then, one brick at a time, we will construct a fully-featured BI solution with a web interface, mobile reporting, and agile analytics.The chapters are ordered by increasing difficulty, and each one builds on top of the preceding chapter so that the learning process is progressive. The examples given in this book are practical, and you will be able to see the immediate result of your efforts. We will first cover setting up the platform, including the creation of the metadata and the different objects that are part of a BI project: tables, attributes, and metrics. Then, we take a look at how to create and analyze reports, charts, documents, and dashboards, as well as how to manipulate data with the desktop application, the web Interface, and an iPad device.The last part of the book is dedicated to advanced topics like the new agile analytics technology from MicroStrategy, where we cover both Visual Insight and MicroStrategy Cloud Express. Whether you are a database developer, data analyst, or a business user, Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook will get you up to speed with one of the most powerful BI platforms on the market with the smallest possible investment of time and money.

Cleaning Data for Effective Data Science. Doing the other 80% of the work with Python, R, and command-line tools

David Mertz

Data cleaning is the all-important first step to successful data science, data analysis, and machine learning. If you work with any kind of data, this book is your go-to resource, arming you with the insights and heuristics experienced data scientists had to learn the hard way.In a light-hearted and engaging exploration of different tools, techniques, and datasets real and fictitious, Python veteran David Mertz teaches you the ins and outs of data preparation and the essential questions you should be asking of every piece of data you work with.Using a mixture of Python, R, and common command-line tools, Cleaning Data for Effective Data Science follows the data cleaning pipeline from start to end, focusing on helping you understand the principles underlying each step of the process. You'll look at data ingestion of a vast range of tabular, hierarchical, and other data formats, impute missing values, detect unreliable data and statistical anomalies, and generate synthetic features. The long-form exercises at the end of each chapter let you get hands-on with the skills you've acquired along the way, also providing a valuable resource for academic courses.

Clojure Data Analysis Cookbook. Dive into data analysis with Clojure through over 100 practical recipes for every stage of the analysis and collection process

Eric Richard Rochester