The Art of Data-Driven Business. Transform your organization into a data-driven one with the power of Python machine learning

Alan Bernardo Palacio

One of the most valuable contributions of data science is toward helping businesses make the right decisions. Understanding this complicated confluence of two disparate worlds, as well as a fiercely competitive market, calls for all the guidance you can get.The Art of Data-Driven Business is your invaluable guide to gaining a business-driven perspective, as well as leveraging the power of machine learning (ML) to guide decision-making in your business. This book provides a common ground of discussion for several profiles within a company.You’ll begin by looking at how to use Python and its many libraries for machine learning. Experienced data scientists may want to skip this short introduction, but you’ll soon get to the meat of the book and explore the many and varied ways ML with Python can be applied to the domain of business decisions through real-world business problems that you can tackle by yourself. As you advance, you’ll gain practical insights into the value that ML can provide to your business, as well as the technical ability to apply a wide variety of tried-and-tested ML methods.By the end of this Python book, you’ll have learned the value of basing your business decisions on data-driven methodologies and have developed the Python skills needed to apply what you’ve learned in the real world.

Mastering Zabbix. Learn how to monitor your large IT environments with this one-stop, comprehensive guide to the Zabbix world

Andrea Dalle Vacche, Andrea Dalle Vacche, Stefano Kewan Lee

Network Science with Python. Explore the networks around us using network science, social network analysis, and machine learning

David Knickerbocker

Network analysis is often taught with tiny or toy data sets, leaving you with a limited scope of learning and practical usage. Network Science with Python helps you extract relevant data, draw conclusions and build networks using industry-standard – practical data sets. You’ll begin by learning the basics of natural language processing, network science, and social network analysis, then move on to programmatically building and analyzing networks. You’ll get a hands-on understanding of the data source, data extraction, interaction with it, and drawing insights from it. This is a hands-on book with theory grounding, specific technical, and mathematical details for future reference. As you progress, you’ll learn to construct and clean networks, conduct network analysis, egocentric network analysis, community detection, and use network data with machine learning. You’ll also explore network analysis concepts, from basics to an advanced level. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to identify network data and use it to extract unconventional insights to comprehend the complex world around you.

Mastering Salesforce Experience Cloud. Strategies for creating powerful customer interactions

Lillie Beiting, Rachel Rogers

Empowering your target audience to interact effortlessly with you and your product offerings is a critical aspect of business in the modern era. Users expect easy, professional digital experiences when engaging with organizations. However, creating engagement applications from scratch is challenging, and connecting user behavior with your organization’s data is even more complex. Enter Salesforce Experience Cloud sites, website portals built on the Salesforce data model that seamlessly connects your user data to your user experience. Mastering Salesforce Experience Cloud focuses on the human-centric nature of this product, beginning with a comprehensive guide on designing for your organization’s desired users and ensuring success for both internal teams and end users. After exploring the real-world applications of Experience Cloud and reviewing license models, this book provides a beginning-to-end guide to mastering the technical backend of this product, covering both out-of-the-box settings and customization techniques. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a deep understanding of the Experience Cloud data model and customization options to create engaging, user-centric digital experiences that deliver value to your organization and stakeholders.

Practical Finite Element Simulations with SOLIDWORKS 2022. An illustrated guide to performing static analysis with SOLIDWORKS Simulation

Khameel B. Mustapha

SOLIDWORKS is a dominant computer-aided design (CAD) software for the 3D modeling, designing, and analysis of components. This book helps you get to grips with SOLIDWORKS Simulation, which is a remarkable and integral part of SOLIDWORKS predominantly deployed for advanced product performance assessment and virtual prototyping.With this book, you'll take a hands-on approach to learning SOLIDWORKS Simulation with the help of step-by-step guidelines on various aspects of the simulation workflow. You'll begin by learning about the requirements for effective simulation of parts and components, along with the idealization of physical components and their representation with finite element models. As you progress through the book, you'll find exercises at the end of each chapter, and you'll be able to download the geometry models used in all the chapters from GitHub. Finally, you’ll discover how to set up finite element simulations for the static analysis of components under various types of loads, and with different types of materials, from simple isotropic to composite, and different boundary conditions.By the end of this SOLIDWORKS 2022 book, you'll be able to conduct basic and advanced static analyses with SOLIDWORKS Simulation and have practical knowledge of how to best use the family of elements in the SOLIDWORKS Simulation library.

Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines

Allan Brito, Ton Roosendaal

Blender 3D provides all the features you need to create super-realistic 3D models of machines for use in artwork, movies, and computer games. Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines gives you step-by-step instructions for building weapons, vehicles, robots, and more.This book will show you how to use Blender 3D for mechanical modeling and product visualization. Through the pages of the book, you will find a step-by-step guide to create three different projects: a fantasy weapon, a spacecraft, and a giant robot. Even though these machines are not realistic, you will be able to build your own sensible and incredible machines with the techniques that you will learn in this book along with the exercises and examples.All the three sections of this book, which cover three projects, are planned to have an increasing learning curve. The first project is about a hand weapon, and with that we can image a small-sized object with tiny details. This first part of the book will show you how to deal with these details and model them in Blender 3D.In the second project, we will create a spacecraft, adding a bit of scale to the project, and new materials and textures as well. With this project, we will be working with metal, glass, and other elements that make the spacecraft. Along with the object, a new space environment will be created in the book too.At the end we have a big and complex object, which is the transforming robot. This last part of the book will cover the modeling of two objects and show how you can make one transform into the other. The scale and number of objects in this project are quite big, but the same principles as in the other projects are applied here with a step-by-step guide on how to go through the workflow of the project.

Mobile Deep Learning with TensorFlow Lite, ML Kit and Flutter. Build scalable real-world projects to implement end-to-end neural networks on Android and iOS

Anubhav Singh, Rimjhim Bhadani

Deep learning is rapidly becoming the most popular topic in the mobile app industry. This book introduces trending deep learning concepts and their use cases with an industrial and application-focused approach. You will cover a range of projects covering tasks such as mobile vision, facial recognition, smart artificial intelligence assistant, augmented reality, and more.With the help of eight projects, you will learn how to integrate deep learning processes into mobile platforms, iOS, and Android. This will help you to transform deep learning features into robust mobile apps efficiently. You’ll get hands-on experience of selecting the right deep learning architectures and optimizing mobile deep learning models while following an application oriented-approach to deep learning on native mobile apps. We will later cover various pre-trained and custom-built deep learning model-based APIs such as machine learning (ML) Kit through Firebase. Further on, the book will take you through examples of creating custom deep learning models with TensorFlow Lite. Each project will demonstrate how to integrate deep learning libraries into your mobile apps, right from preparing the model through to deployment.By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the skills to build and deploy deep learning mobile applications on both iOS and Android.

VMware Virtual SAN Cookbook. The perfect guide to successful VMware Virtual SAN implementation and operations, with recipes to guide you through the process

Jeffrey M Ransom Taylor, Patrick Carmichael, Simon Gallagher, Jeffrey Taylor

Architecting ASP.NET Core Applications. An atypical design patterns guide for .NET 8, C# 12, and beyond - Third Edition

Carl-Hugo Marcotte, Nick Cosentino

This unique ASP.NET Core book will fill in the gaps in your REST API and backend designs. Learn how to build robust, maintainable, and flexible apps using Gang of Four (GoF) design patterns and modern architectural principles. This new edition is updated for .NET 8 and focuses exclusively on the backend, with new content on REST APIs, the REPR pattern, and building modular monoliths.You’ll start by covering foundational concepts like REST, the SOLID principles, Minimal APIs, dependency injection in .NET, and other ASP.NET Core 8 mechanisms. Then, you’ll learn to develop components using design patterns, including many from the GoF. Finally, you’ll explore organizing your application code with patterns that vary from layers to feature-oriented vertical slice designs, covering CQS and a deep dive into microservices along the way. A brand-new e-commerce project at the end of the book will tie it all together.This how-to guide will teach you how to assemble your own APIs from building blocks, to suit whatever real-world requirements you may have.

Codeless Deep Learning with KNIME. Build, train, and deploy various deep neural network architectures using KNIME Analytics Platform

KNIME AG, Kathrin Melcher, Rosaria Silipo

KNIME Analytics Platform is an open source software used to create and design data science workflows. This book is a comprehensive guide to the KNIME GUI and KNIME deep learning integration, helping you build neural network models without writing any code. It’ll guide you in building simple and complex neural networks through practical and creative solutions for solving real-world data problems.Starting with an introduction to KNIME Analytics Platform, you’ll get an overview of simple feed-forward networks for solving simple classification problems on relatively small datasets. You’ll then move on to build, train, test, and deploy more complex networks, such as autoencoders, recurrent neural networks (RNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM), and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In each chapter, depending on the network and use case, you’ll learn how to prepare data, encode incoming data, and apply best practices.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to design a variety of different neural architectures and will be able to train, test, and deploy the final network.

Modern Game Testing. Learn how to test games like a pro, optimize testing effort, and skyrocket your QA career

Nikolina Finska

Few things are more annoying for gamers than encountering a buggy new game. This often leads to negative reviews, and in turn, you’ll find that demand for your games declines. The solution lies in better quality assurance (QA) – and Modern Game Testing will show you how to achieve just that. Whether you’re a new tester, developer or producer, the QA testing techniques shown in this book, using modern methodologies and the latest technology, will have you releasing quality games that are on time and, most importantly, on budget.The book begins by introducing you to QA and the various types of tests that are performed on games. You’ll then explore test cases and bug reporting, building tests for different platforms (even consoles and PCs), and LiveOps and test management. As you advance, you’ll build a QA team from scratch and work with remote QA testers. The chapters help you take a more traditional approach to learning lessons, enabling you to examine the modern agile approach and various testing strategies that you can then adopt. All angles are covered with oodles of examples, so you’ll have everything you need to implement QA strategies in your organization.By the end of this book, you’ll have a clear understanding of the modern methodologies of QA testing for games, and be able to build efficient, reliable, and long-lasting QA teams.

Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step 2010. The smart guide to the successful delivery of your Dynamics business solutions

Vincent Bellefroid, Chandru Shankar

Delivering business solutions is more than just product play. Software is often viewed as the enabler; however, the key to success is how the solution is implemented and how the implementations are managed. With this as the background, Microsoft has developed Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step as the full lifecycle methodology for the Dynamics business solutions portfolio. Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step enables you to maximize your Dynamics investments and increase your efficiency to select, sell, deliver, operate and support your business solution.This book details the use of the Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step methodology to enable the full lifecycle of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step business solutions engagements. Guidance is provided on the due diligence process for the customer that overlaps the solution selling cycle for the service provider, through to the solution implementation phases, encompassing on-going maintenance and upgrades.This book provides detailed coverage of how to use Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step to successfully deliver Dynamics solutions for your business.The book begins by focusing on the aspects of due diligence and solution selling– whether you are the customer or the service provider, you can learn how you work together to select the right solution to meet the organization’s needs.In the ensuing chapters, you will learn how Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step can help improve the overall quality of your Dynamics business solution, including coverage of proactive and post go-live optimization offerings and a thorough explanation of how to upgrade your Dynamics solutions to the latest release of the products.Finally, the book discusses the essence of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step projects and how to successfully deliver these business solutions, including project and change management disciplines and processes.Additional key topics such as a guide to adopting Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step are also provided if you are looking to develop a consistent process in your organization.

Mastering Palo Alto Networks. Build, configure, and deploy network solutions for your infrastructure using features of PAN-OS - Second Edition

Tom Piens aka 'reaper', Kim Wens aka 'kiwi'

Palo Alto Networks’ integrated platform makes it easy to manage network and cloud security along with endpoint protection and a wide range of security services.This book is an end-to-end guide to configure firewalls and deploy them in your network infrastructure. You will see how to quickly set up, configure and understand the technology, and troubleshoot any issues that may occur. This book will serve as your go-to reference for everything from setting up to troubleshooting complex issues. You will learn your way around the web interface and command-line structure, understand how the technology works so you can confidently predict the expected behavior, and successfully troubleshoot any anomalies you may encounter. Finally, you will see how to deploy firewalls in a cloud environment, and special or unique considerations when setting them to protect resources.By the end of this book, for your configuration setup you will instinctively know how to approach challenges, find the resources you need, and solve most issues efficiently.

Mastering SaltStack. Use Salt to the fullest - Second Edition

Joseph Hall

SaltStack is a powerful configuration management and automation suite designed to manage servers and tens of thousands of nodes. This book showcases Salt as a very powerful automation framework. We will review the fundamental concepts to get you in the right frame of mind, and then explore Salt in much greater depth. You will explore Salt SSH as a powerful tool and take Salt Cloud to the next level. Next, you’ll master using Salt services with ease in your infrastructure. You will discover methods and strategies to scale your infrastructure properly. You will also learn how to use Salt as a powerful monitoring tool.By the end of this book, you will have learned troubleshooting tips and best practices to make the entire process of using Salt pain-free and easy.

C# 11 and .NET 7 - Modern Cross-Platform Development Fundamentals. Start building websites and services with ASP.NET Core 7, Blazor, and EF Core 7 - Seventh Edition

Mark J. Price

Extensively revised to accommodate the latest features that come with C# 11 and .NET 7, this latest edition of our guide will get you coding in C# with confidence.You’ll learn object-oriented programming, writing, testing, and debugging functions, implementing interfaces, and inheriting classes. Next, you’ll take on .NET APIs for performing tasks like managing and querying data, working with the filesystem, and serialization. As you progress, you’ll also explore examples of cross-platform projects you can build and deploy, such as websites and services using ASP.NET Core.Instead of distracting you with unnecessary graphical user interface code, the first eleven chapters will teach you about C# language constructs and many of the .NET libraries through simple console applications. Having mastered the basics, you’ll then start building websites, web services, and browser apps.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to create rich web experiences and have a solid grasp of object-oriented programming that you can build upon.

Gideros Mobile Game Development. With Gideros you can develop games for both iOS and Android faster and more simply. This book shows you how with a real-life project you undertake yourself. All that's required is a little familiarity with Lua

Arturs Sosins

Have you ever had an interesting idea for a mobile game? Have you ever wanted to jump on the mobile app bandwagon? Developing a mobile game has never been so fun and easy, and with the vast amount of smartphone users, it may also become a profitable thing to do. Gideros is a Lua-based framework that facilitates effortless native iOS and Android application development along with hardware acceleration. Gideros also comes with a built-in box2D physics engine and extended memory management features to make mobile game development a breeze.Gideros Mobile Game Development shows you how to develop an original and exciting game in Gideros, helping you create your very first project and guiding you through the configuration of settings and assets to help you target devices with different resolutions.This book teaches you everything you need to know about Gideros, from installing Gideros on your operating system to creating and efficiently managing your Gideros projects and creating your very first game, all with the help of well explained examples.You will learn how to quickly create game prototypes in Gideros, how to test and set up projects to automatically target devices with different resolutions, and how to polish your prototype with animations, sounds, tweens, and even physics to create your very first cross-platform game.By the end of this book, you will have learned everything you need to create visually stunning physics and exciting cross-platform games using Gideros.