XR Development with Unity. A beginner's guide to creating virtual, augmented, and mixed reality experiences using Unity

Anna Braun, Raffael Rizzo

The drastic surge in the demand for XR development has led to an imminent need for comprehensive resources, learning material, and overall know-how in this area. This one-stop resource will ensure that professionals venturing into XR development can access all XR-related techniques to build appealing XR applications, without relying on Google every step of the way.This book is your guide to developing XR applications with Unity 2021.3 or later versions, helping you to create VR, AR, and MR experiences of increasing complexity. The chapters cover the entire XR application development process from setting up an interactive XR scene using the XR Interaction Toolkit or AR Foundation, adding physics, animations, continuous movement, teleportation, sound effects, and visual effects, to testing and deploying to VR headsets, simulators, smartphones, and tablets. Additionally, this XR book takes you on a journey from the basics of Unity and C# to advanced techniques such as building multiplayer applications and incorporating hand- and gaze-tracking capabilities.By the end of this book, you'll be fully equipped to create cutting-edge XR projects for engaging individual, academic, and industrial use cases that captivate your audience.

Democratizing Application Development with AppSheet. A citizen developer's guide to building rapid low-code apps with the powerful features of AppSheet

Koichi Tsuji, Suvrutt Gurjar, Takuya Miyai

Many citizen developers regularly use spreadsheets in their business and day-to-day jobs. With AppSheet, you can take your spreadsheets to the next level by enhancing their ease of use. The platform allows you to run your business efficiently and manage it in the field outside of an office or indoor environment. This book enables you to create your own simple or medium to complex hybrid apps for business or personal use.As a beginner to AppSheet, this book will show you how the AppSheet Editor works and how it is used to configure, test, and deploy an app and share it with others as users or co-authors. You’ll learn about widely used features such as how to use data sources, create app views and actions, construct expressions with AppSheet functions, and make your app secure through security and UX options. Next, you’ll create email/attachment templates and develop reports/documents based on templates, store in the cloud, and send files through emails. You’ll also understand how to integrate third-party services and monitor various usage statistics of your app. As you progress, you’ll explore various features with the help of sample apps that you create using the book.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to make the most of AppSheet to build powerful and efficient applications.

Learning Mongoid. If you know MongoDB and Ruby, then Mongoid is a very handy tool to have at your disposal. Quickly learn to build Rails applications with the helpful code samples and instructions in this book

Gautam Rege

Mongoid helps you to leverage the power of schema-less and efficient document-based design, dynamic queries, and atomic modifier operations. Mongoid eases the work of Ruby developers while they are working on complex frameworks.Starting with why and how you should use Mongoid, this book covers the various components of Mongoid. It then delves deeper into the detail of queries and relations, and you will learn some tips and tricks on improving performance. With this book, you will be able to build robust and large-scale web applications with Mongoid and Rails.Starting with the basics, this book introduces you to components such as moped and origin, and how information is managed, learn about the various datatypes, embedded documents, arrays, and hashes. You will learn how a document is stored and manipulated with callbacks, validations, and even atomic updates. This book will then show you the querying mechanism in detail, right from simple to complex queries, and even explains eager loading, lazy evaluation, and chaining of queries. Finally, this book will explain the importance of performance tuning and how to use the right indexes. It also explains MapReduce and the Aggregation Framework.

Mastering iOS Game Development. Mastering iOS Game Development

Miguel DeQuadros

iOS is an operating system for Apple manufactured phones and tablets. Mobile gaming is one of the fastest-growing industries, and compatibility with iOS is now becoming the norm for game developers. SpriteKit is part of the native SDK from Apple, and enables developers to make simple entry into game development without unnecessary overhead and a long learning process. SpriteKit also provides other functionality that is useful for games, including basic sound playback support and physics simulation. In addition, Xcode provides built-in support for SpriteKit so that you can create complex special effects and texture atlases directly in Xcode. This combination of framework and tools makes SpriteKit a good choice for games and other apps that require similar kinds of animation. Become a master in iOS game development through this fast and fun guide! In the beginning, we’ll tell you everything you need to plan and design your game. You’ll then start developing your game through step-by-step instructions using the various built-in technologies of Xcode. From there on, we discuss how to deploy your game to the iOS App Store, as well as monetizing it to make more revenue. You will also learn advanced techniques to improve your game playing experience, including better multi-tasking, improved performance optimization, battery management, and more. To end the book off, we’ll show you how to update your game with different features, then port the update to the App Store.

Docker Certified Associate (DCA): Exam Guide. Enhance and validate your Docker skills by gaining Docker certification

Francisco Javier Ramírez Urea

Developers have changed their deployment artifacts from application binaries to container images, and they now need to build container-based applications as containers are part of their new development workflow. This Docker book is designed to help you learn about the management and administrative tasks of the Containers as a Service (CaaS) platform.The book starts by getting you up and running with the key concepts of containers and microservices. You'll then cover different orchestration strategies and environments, along with exploring the Docker Enterprise platform. As you advance, the book will show you how to deploy secure, production-ready, container-based applications in Docker Enterprise environments. Later, you'll delve into each Docker Enterprise component and learn all about CaaS management. Throughout the book, you'll encounter important exam-specific topics, along with sample questions and detailed answers that will help you prepare effectively for the exam.By the end of this Docker containers book, you'll have learned how to efficiently deploy and manage container-based environments in production, and you will have the skills and knowledge you need to pass the DCA exam.

Instant Magento Shipping How-to. Making Magento shipping settings work for your business

Robert Kent

There is nothing worse for a customer than paying for an item online and never receiving it. As store owners, it is your responsibility to make sure each order is processed correctly, and more importantly—shipped. Configured correctly, Magento's shipping settings will not only make your lives as vendors much easier, but will also, through good service, keep customers coming back for more.Instant Magento Shipping How-to is a comprehensive guide on how to set up your Magento Shipping configuration. This book will also broaden your knowledge of the various systems within Magento that impact upon the shipping settings.Instant Magento Shipping How-to will walk you through the steps required to conduct the initial configuration to allow shipping for your products, taking into account Tax settings and the different product types. Magento's administration panel is a bit of a daunting system. Being able to customise all of Magento's shipping settings is what makes the difference between a store that can take orders and ship them and a store that delivers on all levels.

Python Deep Learning. Understand how deep neural networks work and apply them to real-world tasks - Third Edition

Ivan Vasilev

The field of deep learning has developed rapidly recently and today covers a broad range of applications. This makes it challenging to navigate and hard to understand without solid foundations. This book will guide you from the basics of neural networks to the state-of-the-art large language models in use today.The first part of the book introduces the main machine learning concepts and paradigms. It covers the mathematical foundations, the structure, and the training algorithms of neural networks and dives into the essence of deep learning.The second part of the book introduces convolutional networks for computer vision. We’ll learn how to solve image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and image generation tasks.The third part focuses on the attention mechanism and transformers – the core network architecture of large language models. We’ll discuss new types of advanced tasks they can solve, such as chatbots and text-to-image generation.By the end of this book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of the inner workings of deep neural networks. You'll have the ability to develop new models and adapt existing ones to solve your tasks. You’ll also have sufficient understanding to continue your research and stay up to date with the latest advancements in the field.

Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine. Build professional 3D games with Unreal Engine 4's Visual Scripting system

Brenden Sewell

Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine is a step-by-step approach to building a fully functional game, one system at a time. Starting with a basic First Person Shooter template, each chapter will extend the prototype to create an increasingly complex and robust game experience. You will progress from creating basic shooting mechanics to gradually more complex systems that will generate user interface elements and intelligent enemy behavior. Focusing on universally applicable skills, the expertise you will develop in utilizing Blueprints can translate to other types of genres.By the time you finish the book, you will have a fully functional First Person Shooter game and the skills necessary to expand on the game to develop an entertaining, memorable experience for your players.From making customizations to player movement to creating new AI and game mechanics from scratch, you will discover everything you need to know to get started with game development using Blueprints and Unreal Engine 4.

Architecting and Building High-Speed SoCs. Design, develop, and debug complex FPGA based systems-on-chip

Mounir Maaref

Modern and complex SoCs can adapt to many demanding system requirements by combining the processing power of ARM processors and the feature-rich Xilinx FPGAs. You’ll need to understand many protocols, use a variety of internal and external interfaces, pinpoint the bottlenecks, and define the architecture of an SoC in an FPGA to produce a superior solution in a timely and cost-efficient manner.This book adopts a practical approach to helping you master both the hardware and software design flows, understand key interconnects and interfaces, analyze the system performance and enhance it using the acceleration techniques, and finally build an RTOS-based software application for an advanced SoC design. You’ll start with an introduction to the FPGA SoCs technology fundamentals and their associated development design tools. Gradually, the book will guide you through building the SoC hardware and software, starting from the architecture definition to testing on a demo board or a virtual platform. The level of complexity evolves as the book progresses and covers advanced applications such as communications, security, and coherent hardware acceleration.By the end of this book, you'll have learned the concepts underlying FPGA SoCs’ advanced features and you’ll have constructed a high-speed SoC targeting a high-end FPGA from the ground up.

Integrate Lua with C++. Seamlessly integrate Lua scripting to enhance application flexibility

Wenhuan Li

C++ is a popular choice in the developer community for building complex and large-scale performant applications and systems. Often a need arises to extend the system at runtime, without recompiling the whole C++ program. Using a scripting language like Lua can help achieve this goal efficiently.Integrate Lua to C++ is a comprehensive guide to integrating Lua to C++ and will enable you to achieve the goal of extending C++ programs at runtime. You’ll learn, in sequence, how to get and compile the Lua library, the Lua programming language, calling Lua code from C++, and calling C++ code from Lua. In each topic, you’ll practice with code examples, and learn the in-depth mechanisms for smooth working. Throughout the book, the latter examples build on the earlier ones while also acting as a standalone. You’ll learn to implement Lua executor and Lua binding generator, which you can use in your projects directly with further customizations.By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered integrating Lua into C++ and using Lua in your C++ project efficiently, gained the skills to extend your applications at runtime, and achieved dynamic and adaptable C++ development.

Puppet for Containerization. Manage, orchestrate, and deploy containers with Puppet

Scott Coulton

This book teaches you how to take advantage of the new benefits of containerization systems such as Docker, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Docker UCP, without losing the panoptical power of proper configuration management. You will learn how to integrate your containerized applications and modules with your Puppet workflow. You will also understand how to manage, monitor, and orchestrate hosts to keep deployed containers running seamlessly. With the help of this book, you can efficiently automate and document with containers, as a part of your system.The book will also cover use cases of deploying Puppet within a containerized environment.

Apache Hive Cookbook

Hanish Bansal, Shrey Mehrotra, Saurabh Chauhan

Hive was developed by Facebook and later open sourced in Apache community. Hive provides SQL like interface to run queries on Big Data frameworks. Hive provides SQL like syntax also called as HiveQL that includes all SQL capabilities like analytical functions which are the need of the hour in today’s Big Data world.This book provides you easy installation steps with different types of metastores supported by Hive. This book has simple and easy to learn recipes for configuring Hive clients and services. You would also learn different Hive optimizations including Partitions and Bucketing. The book also covers the source code explanation of latest Hive version.Hive Query Language is being used by other frameworks including spark. Towards the end you will cover integration of Hive with these frameworks.

Optimizing Hadoop for MapReduce. This book is the perfect introduction to sophisticated concepts in MapReduce and will ensure you have the knowledge to optimize job performance. This is not an academic treatise; it’s an example-driven tutorial for the real world

Khaled Tannir

PHP jQuery Cookbook. jQuery and PHP are the dynamic duo that will allow you to build powerful web applications. This Cookbook is the easy way in with over 60 recipes covering everything from the basics to creating plugins and integrating databases

Vijay Joshi

As web technology evolves, the gap between desktop applications and web applications continues to vanish. And what better way to bridge that gap, for your own website, than using the best two open source technologies in the market: PHP and jQuery. The power-combo of these two is leading the way in revolutionizing the RIA world. Although they are easy to integrate, finding or figuring out how to do what you want to do is rather arduous.The PHP jQuery Cookbook will be your handy guide with walkthroughs of common integration tasks and problems that will help you master the possibilities available using the PHP and jQuery combo. You will learn quick solutions to necessary tasks to integrate the power of two of the best known and most widely used web technologies of today – PHP on the server side and jQuery on the client side. Glide through the basics and move to advanced topics to create dynamic and interactive web applications with this book in hand.This book covers a wide array of technical aspects of creating an interactive website. Apart from basics of PHP and jQuery, you will go through advanced topics like creating plugins, validating controls, and useful utilities that you will be able to use as stand-alone tools. AJAX, the key technique of browser-server communication is covered in detail. You will also learn to use JSON, which is becoming preferred as a mode of data interchange over XML, both in web applications and web services.The book also covers database interaction, which is an important part of any dynamic web application. You will also gain expertise in debugging JavaScript with the help of useful tools that will save you hours of tedious manual debugging.Most importantly, by using jQuery and PHP together, you will be able to develop applications that are compatible with all major browsers, with no need to write code targeted at specific browsers!

Testing with F#. Deliver high-quality, bug-free applications by testing them with efficient and expressive functional programming

Mikael Lundin

The Art of Social Engineering. Uncover the secrets behind the human dynamics in cybersecurity

Cesar Bravo, Desilda Toska, Rhonda Childress

Social engineering is one of the most prevalent methods used by attackers to steal data and resources from individuals, companies, and even government entities. This book serves as a comprehensive guide to understanding social engineering attacks and how to protect against them.The Art of Social Engineering starts by giving you an overview of the current cyber threat landscape, explaining the psychological techniques involved in social engineering attacks, and then takes you through examples to demonstrate how to identify those attacks.You’ll learn the most intriguing psychological principles exploited by attackers, including influence, manipulation, rapport, persuasion, and empathy, and gain insights into how attackers leverage technology to enhance their attacks using fake logins, email impersonation, fake updates, and executing attacks through social media. This book will equip you with the skills to develop your own defensive strategy, including awareness campaigns, phishing campaigns, cybersecurity training, and a variety of tools and techniques.By the end of this social engineering book, you’ll be proficient in identifying cyberattacks and safeguarding against the ever-growing threat of social engineering with your defensive arsenal.