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Lee Allen, Kevin Cardwell
The defences continue to improve and become more and more common, but this book will provide you with a number or proven techniques to defeat the latest defences on the networks. The methods and techniques contained will provide you with a powerful arsenal of best practices to increase your penetration testing successes.The processes and methodology will provide you techniques that will enable you to be successful, and the step by step instructions of information gathering and intelligence will allow you to gather the required information on the targets you are testing. The exploitation and post-exploitation sections will supply you with the tools you would need to go as far as the scope of work will allow you. The challenges at the end of each chapter are designed to challenge you and provide real-world situations that will hone and perfect your penetration testing skills. You will start with a review of several well respected penetration testing methodologies, and following this you will learn a step-by-step methodology of professional security testing, including stealth, methods of evasion, and obfuscation to perform your tests and not be detected!The final challenge will allow you to create your own complex layered architecture with defences and protections in place, and provide the ultimate testing range for you to practice the methods shown throughout the book. The challenge is as close to an actual penetration test assignment as you can get!
Christopher Ilacqua, Henric Cronström, James Richardson
The intuitive and powerful Qlik Sense visual analytics software allows anyone to engage in data discovery, to explore your data, and find meaningful insights to empower your business. Qlik Sense lets you easily create personalized reports and visualizations and reveal essential connections to show new opportunities from every angle.Written by members of the Qlik Sense team, this book is the official guide from Qlik to understanding and using their powerful new product with fully updated coverage to the latest features of the most modern edition of Qlik Sense. Benefit from the vision behind the development of Qlik Sense and get to grips with how Qlik Sense can empower you as a data discovery consumer. Learn how to create your own applications for Qlik Sense to customize it to meet your personal needs for business intelligence, and how to oversee and administer the Qlik Sense data architecture. Finally, explore utilizing Qlik Sense to uncover essential data, with practical examples on finding and visualizing intelligence for sales figures, human resources information, travel expense tracking, and demographic data discovery.
Bernardo Iraci
Blender provides a broad spectrum of modeling, texturing, lighting, animation and video post-processing functionality in one package. It provides cross-platform interoperability, extensibility and a tightly integrated workflow. Blender is one of the most popular Open Source 3D graphics applications in the world.Modern GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) have some limitations for rendering complex scenes. This is mainly because of limited memory, and interactivity issues when the same graphics card is also used for displaying and rendering frames. This is where Cycles rendering engine comes into play. Cycles is bundled as an add-on with Blender. Some of the features of Cycles is its quality, speed and having integrated industry standard libraries.This book will show you how to carry out your first steps in Cycles - a brand new rendering engine for Blender. In a gradual and logical way, you will learn how to create complex shaders and lighting setups to face any kind of situation that you may find in Computer Graphics.This book provides information on how to setup your first application in Cycles. You will start by adding lights, materials, and textures to your scene. When it's time for the final render, you will see how to setup Cycles in the best way. You will learn about a wide variety of materials, lighting, techniques, tips, and tricks to get the best out of Cycles. Further on in the book, you will get to know about animation and still shots, and learn how to create advanced materials for realistic rendering, as well cartoon style shaders.This cookbook contains a wide range of different scenes, proposed in a structured and progressive order. During this journey, you will get involved in the concepts behind every step you take in order to really master what you learn.
David Wolff
OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) is a programming language used for customizing parts of the OpenGL graphics pipeline that were formerly fixed-function, and are executed directly on the GPU. It provides programmers with unprecedented flexibility for implementing effects and optimizations utilizing the power of modern GPUs. With Version 4, the language has been further refined to provide programmers with greater power and flexibility, with new stages such as tessellation and compute.OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook provides easy-to-follow examples that first walk you through the theory and background behind each technique, and then go on to provide and explain the GLSL and OpenGL code needed to implement it. Beginner level through to advanced techniques are presented including topics such as texturing, screen-space techniques, lighting, shading, tessellation shaders, geometry shaders, compute shaders, and shadows.OpenGL Shading Language 4 Cookbook is a practical guide that takes you from the fundamentals of programming with modern GLSL and OpenGL, through to advanced techniques. The recipes build upon each other and take you quickly from novice to advanced level code.You'll see essential lighting and shading techniques; examples that demonstrate how to make use of textures for a wide variety of effects and as part of other techniques; examples of screen-space techniques including HDR rendering, bloom, and blur; shadowing techniques; tessellation, geometry, and compute shaders; how to use noise effectively; and animation with particle systems.OpenGL Shading Language 4 Cookbook provides examples of modern shading techniques that can be used as a starting point for programmers to expand upon to produce modern, interactive, 3D computer graphics applications.
María Carina Roldán
Capturing, manipulating, cleansing, transferring, and loading data effectively are the prime requirements in every IT organization. Achieving these tasks require people devoted to developing extensive software programs, or investing in ETL or data integration tools that can simplify this work.Pentaho Data Integration is a full-featured open source ETL solution that allows you to meet these requirements. Pentaho Data Integration has an intuitive, graphical, drag-and-drop design environment and its ETL capabilities are powerful. However, getting started with Pentaho Data Integration can be difficult or confusing.Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide - Second Edition provides the guidance needed to overcome that difficulty, covering all the possible key features of Pentaho Data Integration.Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide - Second Edition starts with the installation of Pentaho Data Integration software and then moves on to cover all the key Pentaho Data Integration concepts. Each chapter introduces new features, allowing you to gradually get involved with the tool. First, you will learn to do all kinds of data manipulation and work with plain files. Then, the book gives you a primer on databases and teaches you how to work with databases inside Pentaho Data Integration. Moreover, you will be introduced to data warehouse concepts and you will learn how to load data in a data warehouse. After that, you will learn to implement simple and complex processes. Finally, you will have the opportunity of applying and reinforcing all the learned concepts through the implementation of a simple datamart.With Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide - Second Edition, you will learn everything you need to know in order to meet your data manipulation requirements.
Erik Westra
Geospatial development links your data to places on the Earth's surface. Writing geospatial programs involves tasks such as grouping data by location, storing and analyzing large amounts of spatial information, performing complex geospatial calculations, and drawing colorful interactive maps. In order to do this well, you'll need appropriate tools and techniques, as well as a thorough understanding of geospatial concepts such as map projections, datums and coordinate systems.Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition teaches you everything you need to know about writing geospatial applications using Python. No prior knowledge of geospatial concepts, tools or techniques is required. The book guides you through the process of installing and using various toolkits, obtaining geospatial data for use in your programs, and building complete and sophisticated geospatial applications in Python.Python Geospatial Development teaches you everything you need to know about writing geospatial applications using Python. No prior knowledge of geospatial concepts, tools or techniques is required. The book guides you through the process of installing and using various toolkits, obtaining geospatial data for use in your programs, and building complete and sophisticated geospatial applications in Python.This book provides an overview of the major geospatial concepts, data sources and toolkits. It teaches you how to store and access spatial data using Python, how to perform a range of spatial calculations, and how to store spatial data in a database. Because maps are such an important aspect of geospatial programming, the book teaches you how to build your own “slippy map” interface within a web application, and finishes with the detailed construction of a geospatial data editor using Geodjango.Whether you want to write quick utilities to solve spatial problems, or develop sophisticated web applications based around maps and geospatial data, this book includes everything you need to know.
Kyle Smith
Splunk provides a platform that allows you to search data stored on a machine, analyze it, and visualize the analyzed data to make informed decisions. The adoption of Splunk in enterprises is huge, and it has a wide range of customers right from Adobe to Dominos. Using the Splunk platform as a user is one thing, but customizing this platform and creating applications specific to your needs takes more than basic knowledge of the platform. This book will dive into developing Splunk applications that cater to your needs of making sense of data and will let you visualize this data with the help of stunning dashboards. This book includes everything on developing a full-fledged Splunk application?right from designing to implementing to publishing. We will design the fundamentals to build a Splunk application and then move on to creating one. During the course of the book, we will cover application data, objects, permissions, and more. After this, we will show you how to enhance the application, including branding, workflows, and enriched data. Views, dashboards, and web frameworks are also covered. This book will showcase everything new in the latest version of Splunk?including the latest data models, alert actions, XML forms, various dashboard enhancements, and visualization options (with D3). Finally, we take a look at the latest Splunk cloud applications, advanced integrations, and development as per the latest release.
Sherry Li, Tomislav Piasevoli
MDX is the BI industry standard for multidimensional calculations and queries. Proficiency with this language is essential for the realization of your Analysis Services' full potential. MDX is an elegant and powerful language, and also has a steep learning curve.SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services has introduced a new BISM tabular model and a new formula language, Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). However, for the multi-dimensional model, MDX is still the only query and expression language. For many product developers and report developers, MDX is the preferred language for both the tabular model and multi-dimensional model.MDX with SSAS 2012 Cookbook is a must-have book for anyone who wants to be proficient in the MDX language and to enhance their business intelligence solutions.MDX with SSAS 2012 Cookbook is packed with immediately usable, practical solutions. It starts with elementary techniques that lay the foundation for designing advanced MDX calculations and queries. The discussions after each solution will provide you with a solid foundation and best practices. It covers a broad range of real-world topics and solutions and provides you with learning materials to become proficient in the language.This book will guide you through the hands-on and practical MDX solutions, best practices, and many intricacies that hide within the MDX calculations and queries.We will start by working with sets, creating time-aware, context-aware calculations, and business analytics solutions, through to the techniques of enhancing the cube design when MDX is not enough. We will then move on to capturing MDX generated by SSAS front-ends and using SSAS stored procedures, and we will explore the whole range of MDX solutions for real-world BI projects.
Dusty Phillips
Python 3 is more versatile and easier to use than ever. It runs on all major platforms in a huge array of use cases. Coding in Python minimizes development time and increases productivity in comparison to other languages. Clean, maintainable code is easy to both read and write using Python's clear, concise syntax.Object-oriented programming is a popular design paradigm in which data and behaviors are encapsulated in such a way that they can be manipulated together. Many modern programming languages utilize the powerful concepts behind object-oriented programming and Python is no exception.Starting with a detailed analysis of object-oriented analysis and design, you will use the Python programming language to clearly grasp key concepts from the object-oriented paradigm. This book fully explains classes, data encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, abstraction, and exceptions with an emphasis on when you can use each principle to develop well-designed software.You'll get an in-depth analysis of many common object-oriented design patterns that are more suitable to Python's unique style. This book will not just teach Python syntax, but will also build your confidence in how to program.You will also learn how to create maintainable applications by studying higher level design patterns. Following this, you'll learn the complexities of string and file manipulation, and how Python distinguishes between binary and textual data. Not one, but two very powerful automated testing systems will be introduced in the book. After you discover the joy of unit testing and just how easy it can be, you'll study higher level libraries such as database connectors and GUI toolkits and learn how they uniquely apply object-oriented principles. You'll learn how these principles will allow you to make greater use of key members of the Python eco-system such as Django and Kivy.This new edition includes all the topics that made Python 3 Object-oriented Programming an instant Packt classic. It's also packed with updated content to reflect recent changes in the core Python library and covers modern third-party packages that were not available on the Python 3 platform when the book was first published.
David Parker
Microsoft Visio is a diagramming program which ultimately allows business professionals to explore and communicate complex information more effectively. Through easy-to-understand visual representations, Visio enables you to present complicated data in a clear and communicative way. Therefore, productivity is increased by utilizing the wide variety of diagrams that can convey information at a glance as data can be understood and acted upon quickly. This book enables business developers to unleash the full potential of Visio 2013 Professional Edition.Microsoft Visio 2013 Business Process Diagramming and Validation is a focused tutorial with a range of practical examples and downloadable code that shows you how to create business process diagramming templates with Visio, enabling you to effectively visualize business information. It draws on real business examples and needs and covers all the new features of Visio 2013 Professional Edition.This focused tutorial will enable you to get to grips with diagram validation in Visio 2013 Professional Edition to the fullest extent, enabling you to perform powerful automatic diagram verification based on custom logic and assuring correct and compliant diagrams. You will learn how to create and publish rules and how to use the ShapeSheet to write formulae. There is also a special focus on extending and enhancing the capabilities of Visio 2013 diagram validation and on features that are not found in the out-of-the-box product, like installing and using the new Rules Tools add-on complete with source code, reviewing the new diagramming rules in flowcharts and BPMN templates, and creating your own enhanced Data Flow Model Diagram template complete with validation rules.Microsoft Visio 2013 Business Process Diagramming and Validation begins by covering the basic functions of Visio 2013 before moving on to discuss how to formulate your own validation rules and how to use the Visio Object Model. ShapeSheet functions are explored in detail as well as how to create validation rule sets and visualizing issues, with practical demonstrations along the way. It also covers integration with SharePoint 2013 and Office365 and how to build a Rules Tools add-on using C#, how to create test and filter expressions, and how to publish validation rules for others to use. Finally, the book concludes with the creation and implementation of a new RuleSet for Data Flow Model Diagrams with a worked example. By following the practical and immediately deployable examples found in this book, you will successfully learn how to use the features of Microsoft Visio 2013 and how to extend the functionality provided in the box.
Amuthan Ganeshan
Spring MVC helps you build flexible and loosely coupled web applications. The Spring MVC Framework is architected and designed in such a way that every piece of logic and functionality is highly configurable. Also, Spring can integrate effortlessly with other popular web frameworks such as Struts, WebWork, Java Server Faces, and Tapestry. The book progressively teaches you to configure the Spring development environment, architecture, controllers, libraries, and more before moving on to developing a full web application. It begins with an introduction to the Spring development environment and architecture so you're familiar with the know-hows. From here, we move on to controllers, views, validations, Spring Tag libraries, and more. Finally, we integrate it all together to develop a web application. You'll also get to grips with testing applications for reliability.
Stephen Kelly, Stephen D. Kelly
Oracle's Primavera Contract Management, Business Intelligence Publisher Edition is a document management, job cost, and field controls solution that keeps construction projects on schedule and on budget through complete project control. Oracle Primavera Contract Management, Business Intelligence Publisher Edition v14 explains the concepts behind the core modules and how to use them.Oracle Primavera Contract Management, Business Intelligence Publisher Edition v14 makes this complex application understandable. You will understand the concepts behind the core modules and how to use them. This book starts with some basic introduction to Contract management and then covers the advantages and disadvantages of using a spreadsheet in managing information on a project. The book then covers in detail the concepts involved with how it works from a 30,000 foot view and explains the concept of how Oracle Primavera Contract Management is diametrically opposed to a spreadsheet mentality. The book also covers the aspects of how Oracle Primavera Contract Management manages the money and contractual relationships on a project.
Practical Data Analysis. Pandas, MongoDB, Apache Spark, and more - Second Edition
Hector Cuesta, Dr. Sampath Kumar
Beyond buzzwords like Big Data or Data Science, there are a great opportunities to innovate in many businesses using data analysis to get data-driven products. Data analysis involves asking many questions about data in order to discover insights and generate value for a product or a service.This book explains the basic data algorithms without the theoretical jargon, and you’ll get hands-on turning data into insights using machine learning techniques. We will perform data-driven innovation processing for several types of data such as text, Images, social network graphs, documents, and time series, showing you how to implement large data processing with MongoDB and Apache Spark.
Extending Puppet. Tools and Techniques for smarter infrastructure configuration - Second Edition
Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor
Puppet has changed the way we manage our systems, but Puppet itself is changing and evolving, and so are the ways we are using it. To tackle our IT infrastructure challenges and avoid common errors when designing our architectures, an up-to-date, practical, and focused view of the current and future Puppet evolution is what we need. With Puppet, you define the state of your IT infrastructure, and it automatically enforces the desired state.This book will be your guide to designing and deploying your Puppet architecture. It will help you utilize Puppet to manage your IT infrastructure. Get to grips with Hiera and learn how to install and configure it, before learning best practices for writing reusable and maintainable code. You will also be able to explore the latest features of Puppet 4, before executing, testing, and deploying Puppet across your systems. As you progress, Extending Puppet takes you through higher abstraction modules, along with tips for effective code workflow management.Finally, you will learn how to develop plugins for Puppet - as well as some useful techniques that can help you to avoid common errors and overcome everyday challenges.
Jeff Martin
Visual Studio 2015 is the premier tool for developers targeting the Microsoft platform. Learning how to effectively use this technology can enhance your productivity while simplifying your most common tasks, allowing you more time to focus on your project. Visual Studio 2015 is packed with improvements that increase productivity, and this book walks you through each one in succession to help you smooth your workflow and get more accomplished. From customization and the interface to code snippets and debugging, the Visual Studio upgrade expands your options — and this book is your fast-track guide to getting on board quickly.Visual Studio 2015 Cookbook will introduce you to all the new areas of Visual Studio and how they can quickly be put to use to improve your everyday development tasks. With this book, you will learn not only what VS2015 offers, but what it takes to put it to work for your projects.
Using CiviCRM. Click here to enter text. - Second Edition
Erik Hommel, Joseph Murray, Brian P Shaughnessy
CiviCRM provides a powerful toolbox of resources to help organizations manage relationships with constituents. It is free, open source, web-based, and geared specifically to meet the constituent relationship management needs of the not-for-profit sector.Beginning with broader questions about how your organization is structured, which existing workflows are critical to your operations, and the overarching purpose of a centralized CRM, the book proceeds step by step through configuring CiviCRM, understanding the choices when setting up the system, importing data, and exploring the breadth of tools available throughout the system. You will see how to best use this software to handle event registrations, accept and track contributions, manage paid and free memberships and subscriptions, segment contacts, send bulk e-mails with open and click-through tracking, manage outreach campaigns, and set up case management workflows that match your organization’s roles and rules. With specific emphasis on helping implementers ask the right questions, consider key principals when setting up the system, and understand usage through case studies and examples, the book comprehensively reviews the functionality of CiviCRM and the opportunities it provides.With this book, you can help your organization better achieve its mission as a charity, industry association, professional society, political advocacy group, community group, government agency, or other similar organization and position yourself to become a power user who efficiently and effectively navigates the system.
Rick Boyer, Kyle Mew
The Android OS has the largest installation base of any operating system in the world; there has never been a better time to learn Android development to write your own applications, or to make your own contributions to the open source community!This “cookbook” will make it easy for you to jump to a topic of interest and get what you need to implement the feature in your own application. If you are new to Android and learn best by “doing,” then this book will provide many topics of interest. Starting with the basics of Android development, we move on to more advanced concepts, and we’ll guide you through common tasks developers struggle to solve. The first few chapters cover the basics including Activities, Layouts, Widgets, and the Menu. From there, we cover fragments and data storage (including SQLite), device sensors, the camera, and GPS. Then we move on more advanced topics such as graphics and animation (including OpenGL), multi-threading with AsyncTask, and Internet functionality with Volley. We’ll also demonstrate Google Maps and Google Cloud Messaging (also known as Push Notifications) using the Google API Library.Finally, we’ll take a look at several online services designed especially for Android development. Take your application big-time with full Internet web services without having to become a server admin by leveraging the power of Backend as a Service (BaaS) providers.
Josh Diakun, Derek Mock, Paul R. Johnson
Splunk makes it easy for you to take control of your data, and with Splunk Operational Cookbook, you can be confident that you are taking advantage of the Big Data revolution and driving your business with the cutting edge of operational intelligence and business analytics. With more than 70 recipes that demonstrate all of Splunk’s features, not only will you find quick solutions to common problems, but you’ll also learn a wide range of strategies and uncover new ideas that will make you rethink what operational intelligence means to you and your organization.You’ll discover recipes on data processing, searching and reporting, dashboards, and visualizations to make data shareable, communicable, and most importantly meaningful. You’ll also find step-by-step demonstrations that walk you through building an operational intelligence application containing vital features essential to understanding data and to help you successfully integrate a data-driven way of thinking in your organization.Throughout the book, you’ll dive deeper into Splunk, explore data models and pivots to extend your intelligence capabilities, and perform advanced searching to explore your data in even more sophisticated ways. Splunk is changing the business landscape, so make sure you’re taking advantage of it.
Yii2 Application Development Cookbook. Click here to enter text. - Third Edition
Sergey Ivanov, Andrew Bogdanov, Dmitry Eliseev
Yii is a free, open source web application development framework written in PHP5 that promotes clean DRY design and encourages rapid development. It works to streamline your application development time and helps to ensure an extremely efficient, extensible, and maintainable end product. Being extremely performance optimized, Yii is a perfect choice for any size project. However, it has been built with sophisticated, enterprise applications in mind. You have full control over the configuration from head-to-toe (presentation-to-persistence) to conform to your enterprise development guidelines. It comes packaged with tools to help test and debug your application, and has clear and comprehensive documentation.This book is a collection of Yii2 recipes. Each recipe is represented as a full and independent item, which showcases solutions from real web-applications. So you can easily reproduce them in your environment and learn Yii2 fast and without tears. All recipes are explained with step-by-step code examples and clear screenshots.Yii2 is like a suit that looks great off the rack, but is also very easy to tailor to fit your needs. Virtually every component of the framework is extensible. This book will show how to use official extensions, extend any component, or write a new one.This book will help you create modern web applications quickly, and make sure they perform well using examples and business logic from real life. You will deal with the Yii command line, migrations, and assets. You will learn about role-based access, security, and deployment. We’ll show you how to easily get started, configure your environment, and be ready to write web applications efficiently and quickly.
Eclipse Plug-in Development Beginner's Guide. Extend and customize Eclipse - Second Edition
Alex Blewitt
Eclipse is used by everyone from indie devs to NASA engineers. Its popularity is underpinned by its impressive plug-in ecosystem, which allows it to be extended to meet the needs of whoever is using it. This book shows you how to take full advantage of the Eclipse IDE by building your own useful plug-ins from start to finish.Taking you through the complete process of plug-in development, from packaging to automated testing and deployment, this book is a direct route to quicker, cleaner Java development. It may be for beginners, but we're confident that you'll develop new skills quickly. Pretty soon you'll feel like an expert, in complete control of your IDE.Don't let Eclipse define you - extend it with the plug-ins you need today for smarter, happier, and more effective development.
Natalie Maclees
A step-by-step guide that spices up your web pages and designs them in the way you want using the most widely used JavaScript library, jQuery. The beginner-friendly and easy-to-understand approach of the book will help get to grips with jQuery in no time. If you know the fundamentals of HTML and CSS, and want to extend your knowledge by learning to use JavaScript, then this is just the book for you. jQuery makes JavaScript straightforward and approachable – you'll be surprised at how easy it can be to add animations and special effects to your beautifully designed pages.
Mat Ryer
Go is the language of the Internet age, and the latest version of Go comes with major architectural changes. Implementation of the language, runtime, and libraries has changed significantly. The compiler and runtime are now written entirely in Go. The garbage collector is now concurrent and provides dramatically lower pause times by running in parallel with other Go routines when possible.This book will show you how to leverage all the latest features and much more. This book shows you how to build powerful systems and drops you into real-world situations. You will learn to develop high quality command-line tools that utilize the powerful shell capabilities and perform well using Go's in-built concurrency mechanisms. Scale, performance, and high availability lie at the heart of our projects, and the lessons learned throughout this book will arm you with everything you need to build world-class solutions. You will get a feel for app deployment using Docker and Google App Engine. Each project could form the basis of a start-up, which means they are directly applicable to modern software markets.
Daniele Teti
Delphi is a cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports rapid application development for Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Google Android, and Apple iOS. It helps you to concentrate on the real business and save yourself the pain of wandering amid GUI widget details, or having to tackle inter-platform incompatibilities. It also has a wide range of drag-and-drop controls, helping you code your business logic into your business model, and it compiles natively for desktop and mobile platforms.This book will teach you how to design and develop applications, deploy them on the cloud platform, and distribute them within an organization via Google Play and other similar platforms.You will begin with the basics of Delphi and get acquainted with JSON format strings, XSLT transformations, unicode encodings and various types of streams. We then move on to more advanced topics such as developing higher-order functions and using enumerators and RTTI. You will get an understanding of how Delphi RTL functions and how to use FireMonkey in a VCL application. We will then cover topics such as multithreading, using the parallel programming library and putting Delphi on a server. We will also take a look at the new feature of WebBroker Apache modules and then ride the mobile revolution with FireMonkey. By the end of the book, you will be able to develop and deploy cross-platform applications using Delphi .
Kurt Jaegers
XNA Game Studio enables hobbyists and independent game developers to easily create video games, and now gives that power to Visual Basic developers. XNA lets you bring your creations to life on Windows, the Xbox 360 and the Windows Phone platforms. The latest release of XNA has added support to Visual Basic and therefore, Visual Basic developers now have the power to give life to their creativity with XNA.This book covers both the concepts and the implementations necessary to get you started on bringing your own creations to life with XNA. It presents four different games, including a puzzler, space shooter, multi-axis shoot 'em up, and a jump-and-run platformer. Each game introduces new concepts and techniques to build a solid foundation for your own ideas and creativity.This book details the creation of four games, all in different styles, from start to finish using Visual Basic and the Microsoft XNA framework. Beginning with the basics of drawing images to the screen, the book then incrementally introduces sprite animation, particles, sound effects, tile-based maps, and path finding. It then explores combining XNA with Windows Forms to build an interactive map editor, and builds a platform-style game using the editor-generated maps. Finally, the book covers the considerations necessary for deploying your games to the Xbox 360 platform.By the end of the book, you will have a solid foundation of game development concepts and techniques as well as working sample games to extend and innovate upon. You will have the knowledge necessary to create games that you can complete without an army of fellow game developers at your back.