Azure Databricks Cookbook. Accelerate and scale real-time analytics solutions using the Apache Spark-based analytics service

Phani Raj, Vinod Jaiswal

Azure Databricks is a unified collaborative platform for performing scalable analytics in an interactive environment. The Azure Databricks Cookbook provides recipes to get hands-on with the analytics process, including ingesting data from various batch and streaming sources and building a modern data warehouse.The book starts by teaching you how to create an Azure Databricks instance within the Azure portal, Azure CLI, and ARM templates. You’ll work through clusters in Databricks and explore recipes for ingesting data from sources, including files, databases, and streaming sources such as Apache Kafka and EventHub. The book will help you explore all the features supported by Azure Databricks for building powerful end-to-end data pipelines. You'll also find out how to build a modern data warehouse by using Delta tables and Azure Synapse Analytics. Later, you’ll learn how to write ad hoc queries and extract meaningful insights from the data lake by creating visualizations and dashboards with Databricks SQL. Finally, you'll deploy and productionize a data pipeline as well as deploy notebooks and Azure Databricks service using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).By the end of this Azure book, you'll be able to use Azure Databricks to streamline different processes involved in building data-driven apps.

Machine Learning for Imbalanced Data. Tackle imbalanced datasets using machine learning and deep learning techniques

Kumar Abhishek, Dr. Mounir Abdelaziz

As machine learning practitioners, we often encounter imbalanced datasets in which one class has considerably fewer instances than the other. Many machine learning algorithms assume an equilibrium between majority and minority classes, leading to suboptimal performance on imbalanced data. This comprehensive guide helps you address this class imbalance to significantly improve model performance.Machine Learning for Imbalanced Data begins by introducing you to the challenges posed by imbalanced datasets and the importance of addressing these issues. It then guides you through techniques that enhance the performance of classical machine learning models when using imbalanced data, including various sampling and cost-sensitive learning methods.As you progress, you’ll delve into similar and more advanced techniques for deep learning models, employing PyTorch as the primary framework. Throughout the book, hands-on examples will provide working and reproducible code that’ll demonstrate the practical implementation of each technique.By the end of this book, you’ll be adept at identifying and addressing class imbalances and confidently applying various techniques, including sampling, cost-sensitive techniques, and threshold adjustment, while using traditional machine learning or deep learning models.

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

Becoming a Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Solution Architect. Implement industry-grade finance and supply chain solutions for successful enterprise resource planning (ERP)

Brent Dawson, Laurynas Merkelis

Implementing an ERP project is a daunting task, and it can often get derailed due to several reasons, including but not limited to inefficient planning, inadequate resource scoping, insufficient working knowledge of ERP systems, and more. Becoming a Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Solution Architect helps you understand the intricacies of ERP project implementation for seamless deployment.This comprehensive guide helps you gain a deep understanding of how to implement and optimize robust business applications that meet the evolving needs of organizations. You’ll discover various integration methodologies to integrate different software applications and plan successful data migration seamlessly. By leveraging the author’s expertise, you’ll explore different challenges that can lead to project failure or cost/time overruns, along with customized solutions to maneuver past those issues for a successful outcome.By the end of the book, you’ll be able to identify potential issues that can negatively impact the delivery of the project and make design decisions that will prevent any potential negative impact on the design and functionality of the system at go-live stage.

ASP.NET Web API Security Essentials. Take the security of your ASP.NET Web API to the next level using some of the most amazing security techniques around

Rajesh Gunasundaram

This book incorporates the new features of ASP.NET Web API 2 that will help you to secure an ASP.NET Web API and make a well-informed decision when choosing the right security mechanism for your security requirements.We start by showing you how to set up a browser client to utilize ASP.NET Web API services. We then cover ASP.NET Web API’s security architecture, authentication, and authorization to help you secure a web API from unauthorized users. Next, you will learn how to use SSL with ASP.NET Web API, including using SSL client certificates, and integrate the ASP.NET Identity system with ASP.NET Web API.We’ll show you how to secure a web API using OAuth2 to authenticate against a membership database using OWIN middleware. You will be able to use local logins to send authenticated requests using OAuth2. We also explain how to secure a web API using forms authentication and how users can log in with their Windows credentials using integrated Windows authentication. You will come to understand the need for external authentication services to enable OAuth/OpenID and social media authentication. We’ll then help you implement anti-Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) measures in ASP.NET Web API.Finally, you will discover how to enable Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) in your web API application.

Oracle Data Guard 11gR2 Administration : Beginner's Guide. If you're an Oracle Database Administrator it's almost essential to know how to protect and preserve your data. This is the perfect primer to Data Guard that covers all the bases with a totally practical, user-friendly approach

Nassyam Basha, Emre Baransel, Yunus Emre Baransel

Data Guard is the high availability, disaster recovery and data replication solution for Oracle Databases.With the huge growth of Data Guard it's getting harder to encounter an Oracle DBA not dealing with Data Guard. Since it's a common DBA task to provide high availability of databases, Data Guard is a must-know topic for every Oracle Database Administrator.Oracle Data Guard 11g R2 Beginner's Administration Guide is a practical guide that provides all the information you will need to configure and maintain Data Guard. This book will show you what Data Guard can really do.By following the practical examples in this book, you'll learn to set up your Data Guard Broker, the management framework for Data Guard configurations. Learn and implement different data protection modes, perform role transitions between databases (switchover and failover) and configure Active Data Guard. Next, we will dive into the features of Snapshot Standby. The book progresses into looking at Data Guard configuration with other Oracle products (such as EM, RAC, and RMAN) and patch databases in Data Guard. The final chapters will cover commonly encountered Data Guard issues and Data Guard best practices, which are very important to make a Data Guard configuration perfect and take maximum advantage of Data Guard properties.

Building Data-Driven Applications with LlamaIndex. A practical guide to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to enhance LLM applications

Andrei Gheorghiu

Discover the immense potential of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) with this comprehensive guide. Learn to overcome LLM limitations, such as contextual memory constraints, prompt size issues, real-time data gaps, and occasional ‘hallucinations’. Follow practical examples to personalize and launch your LlamaIndex projects, mastering skills in ingesting, indexing, querying, and connecting dynamic knowledge bases. From fundamental LLM concepts to LlamaIndex deployment and customization, this book provides a holistic grasp of LlamaIndex's capabilities and applications. By the end, you'll be able to resolve LLM challenges and build interactive AI-driven applications using best practices in prompt engineering and troubleshooting Generative AI projects.

Mastering Malware Analysis. A malware analyst's practical guide to combating malicious software, APT, cybercrime, and IoT attacks - Second Edition

Alexey Kleymenov, Amr Thabet

New and developing technologies inevitably bring new types of malware with them, creating a huge demand for IT professionals that can keep malware at bay. With the help of this updated second edition of Mastering Malware Analysis, you’ll be able to add valuable reverse-engineering skills to your CV and learn how to protect organizations in the most efficient way.This book will familiarize you with multiple universal patterns behind different malicious software types and teach you how to analyze them using a variety of approaches.You'll learn how to examine malware code and determine the damage it can possibly cause to systems, along with ensuring that the right prevention or remediation steps are followed. As you cover all aspects of malware analysis for Windows, Linux, macOS, and mobile platforms in detail, you’ll also get to grips with obfuscation, anti-debugging, and other advanced anti-reverse-engineering techniques. The skills you acquire in this cybersecurity book will help you deal with all types of modern malware, strengthen your defenses, and prevent or promptly mitigate breaches regardless of the platforms involved.By the end of this book, you will have learned how to efficiently analyze samples, investigate suspicious activity, and build innovative solutions to handle malware incidents.

Chef: Powerful Infrastructure Automation. Deploy software, manage hosts, and scale your infrastructure with Chef

Matthias Marschall, John Ewart, Earl Waud

Chef is a configuration management tool that turns IT infrastructure into code. Chef provides tools to manage systems at scale. This learning path takes you on a comprehensive tour of Chef's functionality, ranging from its core features to advanced development. You will be brought up to speed with what's new in Chef and how to set up your own Chef infrastructure for individuals, or small or large teams. You will learn to use the basic Chef command-line tools. We will also take you through the core concepts of managing users, applications, and your entire cloud infrastructure. You will learn the techniques of the pros by walking you through a host of step-by-step guides to solve real-world infrastructure automation challenges.You will learn to automate and document every aspect of your network, from the hardware to software, middleware, and all your containers. You will become familiar with the Chef'sProvisioning tool. By the end of this course, you will be confident in how to manage your infrastructure, scale using the cloud, and extend the built-in functionality of Chef itself.The books used in this Learning Path are:1) Chef Essentials2)Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook – Second Edition3)Mastering Chef Provisioning

Engineering MLOps. Rapidly build, test, and manage production-ready machine learning life cycles at scale

Emmanuel Raj

Engineering MLps presents comprehensive insights into MLOps coupled with real-world examples in Azure to help you to write programs, train robust and scalable ML models, and build ML pipelines to train and deploy models securely in production.The book begins by familiarizing you with the MLOps workflow so you can start writing programs to train ML models. Then you’ll then move on to explore options for serializing and packaging ML models post-training to deploy them to facilitate machine learning inference, model interoperability, and end-to-end model traceability. You’ll learn how to build ML pipelines, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and monitor pipelines to systematically build, deploy, monitor, and govern ML solutions for businesses and industries. Finally, you’ll apply the knowledge you’ve gained to build real-world projects.By the end of this ML book, you'll have a 360-degree view of MLOps and be ready to implement MLOps in your organization.

Beginning C++ Game Programming. Learn C++ from scratch and get started building your very own games

John Horton

This book is all about offering you a fun introduction to the world of game programming, C++, and the OpenGL-powered SFML using three fun, fully-playable games. These games are an addictive frantic two-button tapper, a multi-level zombie survival shooter, and a split-screen multiplayer puzzle-platformer.We will start with the very basics of programming, such as variables, loops, and conditions and you will become more skillful with each game as you move through the key C++ topics, such as OOP (Object-Orientated Programming), C++ pointers, and an introduction to the Standard Template Library. While building these games, you will also learn exciting game programming concepts like particle effects, directional sound (spatialization), OpenGL programmable Shaders, spawning thousands of objects, and more.

3ds Max Speed Modeling for 3D Artists. Is your 3D modeling up to speed? It soon will be with this brilliant practical guide to speed modeling with 3ds Max, focusing on hard surfaces. Raise your productivity a notch and gain a new level of professionalism

Thomas Mooney

Production of 3D art is an exciting medium, but the task of modeling requires intense attention to detail, so speed and efficiency are vital. This book breaks down speed modeling workflow in 3ds Max into stages you can easily achieve, with a focus on hard surface modeling and methods you can apply to your own designs.3ds Max Speed Modeling for 3D Artists will help level up your 3D modeling skills. It focuses on hard surface modeling, and shows the range of tools and techniques in 3ds Max 2013.This book shows content creation methods aimed at 3ds Max modelers preparing to show their skill to the industry. The key feature of modeling that artists must exhibit is speediness while preserving technical accuracy. The author helps you follow set project guidelines while pushing creativity and outlines the entire workflow from concept development to exporting a game-ready model.The book begins with introductions for new users to the interface and modeling tools, and progresses to topics aimed at users already familiar with 3ds Max, who want to improve their content creation process. You'll also see ways 3ds Max content is used with other applications, like sculpting software and game editors, and learn features of speed modeling, efficient workflow, re-use of content, and tips on getting more done, more quickly.By the end of this book you will have learned key topics in modeling, ready to face professional level work with elan.

Minimal APIs in ASP.NET 9. Design, implement, and optimize robust APIs in C# with .NET 9 - Second Edition

Nick Proud

Written by an esteemed technology leader, a .NET specialist, and Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies, Minimal APIs in ASP.NET 9 provides you with specialized insights into the latest advancements in .NET technology, particularly minimal APIs.You’ll get your first minimal API set up and running, before exploring the anatomy of a typical minimal API project, seeing how the framework can be used to create various HTTP endpoints, route, and validate requests, as well as enhancing those requests with custom middleware. After covering the basics, you’ll move on to data mapping, managing important dependencies through dependency injection and integrating your minimal APIs with data sources such as Entity Framework, Dapper, and SQL databases for creating CRUD operations. The chapters also walk you through performance optimization, asynchronous programming, and caching, which’ll allow you to examine the more advanced aspects of minimal API development, with code examples reflecting real-world scenarios.By the end of this book, you’ll be armed with the necessary best practices and skills needed for deploying performant, elegant, and scalable minimal APIs in .NET.

Bayesian Analysis with Python. A practical guide to probabilistic modeling - Third Edition

Osvaldo Martin, Christopher Fonnesbeck, Thomas Wiecki

The third edition of Bayesian Analysis with Python serves as an introduction to the main concepts of applied Bayesian modeling using PyMC, a state-of-the-art probabilistic programming library, and other libraries that support and facilitate modeling like ArviZ, for exploratory analysis of Bayesian models; Bambi, for flexible and easy hierarchical linear modeling; PreliZ, for prior elicitation; PyMC-BART, for flexible non-parametric regression; and Kulprit, for variable selection.In this updated edition, a brief and conceptual introduction to probability theory enhances your learning journey by introducing new topics like Bayesian additive regression trees (BART), featuring updated examples. Refined explanations, informed by feedback and experience from previous editions, underscore the book's emphasis on Bayesian statistics. You will explore various models, including hierarchical models, generalized linear models for regression and classification, mixture models, Gaussian processes, and BART, using synthetic and real datasets.By the end of this book, you will possess a functional understanding of probabilistic modeling, enabling you to design and implement Bayesian models for your data science challenges. You'll be well-prepared to delve into more advanced material or specialized statistical modeling if the need arises.

Torque 3D Game Development Cookbook. Over 80 practical recipes and hidden gems for getting the most out of the Torque 3D game engine

DAVID WYAND

Torque 3D is a popular game engine that supports you in every step along the way to making your game a reality. Even with all of the power and tools that Torque 3D provides, finishing a high quality 3D game requires time and knowledge.Torque 3D Game Development Cookbook is a practical guide that takes you through each of the major steps on the journey to creating your game, while learning a few tricks along the way.The recipes in this book start off with learning some of the finer points about TorqueScript. The book then moves on to each of Torque 3D's subsystems and ends with a variety of game play recipes.The various topics covered include activating level-specific game code and scheduling game events, dragging and dropping items between windows to work with an in-game inventory system, and covering the seams between objects with well placed decals. Some of the advanced topics include writing custom shaders and postFX, using zones to improve rendering performance, and enhancing your game's ambience through sound.Once you are done with Torque 3D Game Development Cookbook you'll be on your way to creating amazing 3D games and gain expert knowledge of Torque 3D.

Minitab Cookbook. With over 110 practical recipes, this is the ideal book for all statisticians who want to explore the vast capabilities of Minitab to organize data, analyze it, and visualize it with impactful graphs

Isaac Newton, Isaac A Newton