Vulkan Cookbook. Work through recipes to unlock the full potential of the next generation graphics API—Vulkan

Pawel Lapinski

Vulkan is the next generation graphics API released by the Khronos group. It is expected to be the successor to OpenGL and OpenGL ES, which it shares some similarities with such as its cross-platform capabilities, programmed pipeline stages, or nomenclature. Vulkan is a low-level API that gives developers much more control over the hardware, but also adds new responsibilities such as explicit memory and resources management. With it, though, Vulkan is expected to be much faster.This book is your guide to understanding Vulkan through a series of recipes. We start off by teaching you how to create instances in Vulkan and choose the device on which operations will be performed. You will then explore more complex topics such as command buffers, resources and memory management, pipelines, GLSL shaders, render passes, and more. Gradually, the book moves on to teach you advanced rendering techniques, how to draw 3D scenes, and how to improve the performance of your applications.By the end of the book, you will be familiar with the latest advanced techniques implemented with the Vulkan API, which can be used on a wide range of platforms.

Securing Network Infrastructure. Discover practical network security with Nmap and Nessus 7

Sairam Jetty, Sagar Rahalkar

Digitization drives technology today, which is why it’s so important for organizations to design security mechanisms for their network infrastructures. Analyzing vulnerabilities is one of the best ways to secure your network infrastructure.This Learning Path begins by introducing you to the various concepts of network security assessment, workflows, and architectures. You will learn to employ open source tools to perform both active and passive network scanning and use these results to analyze and design a threat model for network security. With a firm understanding of the basics, you will then explore how to use Nessus and Nmap to scan your network for vulnerabilities and open ports and gain back door entry into a network. As you progress through the chapters, you will gain insights into how to carry out various key scanning tasks, including firewall detection, OS detection, and access management to detect vulnerabilities in your network.By the end of this Learning Path, you will be familiar with the tools you need for network scanning and techniques for vulnerability scanning and network protection.This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books:•Network Scanning Cookbook by Sairam Jetty•Network Vulnerability Assessment by Sagar Rahalkar

Network Vulnerability Assessment. Identify security loopholes in your network’s infrastructure

Sagar Rahalkar

The tech world has been taken over by digitization to a very large extent, and so it’s become extremely important for an organization to actively design security mechanisms for their network infrastructures. Analyzing vulnerabilities can be one of the best ways to secure your network infrastructure.Network Vulnerability Assessment starts with network security assessment concepts, workflows, and architectures. Then, you will use open source tools to perform both active and passive network scanning. As you make your way through the chapters, you will use these scanning results to analyze and design a threat model for network security. In the concluding chapters, you will dig deeper into concepts such as IP network analysis, Microsoft Services, and mail services. You will also get to grips with various security best practices, which will help you build your network security mechanism.By the end of this book, you will be in a position to build a security framework fit for an organization.

AWS Networking Cookbook. Powerful recipes to overcome the pain points of optimizing your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Satyajit Das, Jhalak Modi

This book starts with practical recipes on the fundamentals of cloud networking and gradually moves on to configuring networks and implementing infrastructure automation. This book then supplies in-depth recipes on networking components like Network Interface, Internet Gateways, DNS, Elastic IP addresses, and VPN CloudHub. Later, this book also delves into designing, implementing, and optimizing static and dynamic routing architectures, multi-region solutions, and highly available connectivity for your enterprise. Finally, this book will teach you to troubleshoot your VPC's network, increasing your VPC's efficiency. By the end of this book, you will have advanced knowledge of AWS networking concepts and technologies and will have mastered implementing infrastructure automation and optimizing your VPC.

Natural Language Processing with Python Quick Start Guide. Going from a Python developer to an effective Natural Language Processing Engineer

Nirant Kasliwal

NLP in Python is among the most sought after skills among data scientists. With code and relevant case studies, this book will show how you can use industry-grade tools to implement NLP programs capable of learning from relevant data. We will explore many modern methods ranging from spaCy to word vectors that have reinvented NLP.The book takes you from the basics of NLP to building text processing applications. We start with an introduction to the basic vocabulary along with a work?ow for building NLP applications.We use industry-grade NLP tools for cleaning and pre-processing text, automatic question and answer generation using linguistics, text embedding, text classifier, and building a chatbot. With each project, you will learn a new concept of NLP. You will learn about entity recognition, part of speech tagging and dependency parsing for Q and A. We use text embedding for both clustering documents and making chatbots, and then build classifiers using scikit-learn.We conclude by deploying these models as REST APIs with Flask.By the end, you will be confident building NLP applications, and know exactly what to look for when approaching new challenges.

Vue.js 2 and Bootstrap 4 Web Development. Build responsive SPAs with Bootstrap 4, Vue.js 2, and Firebase

Olga Filipova

In this book, we will build a full stack web application right from scratch up to its deployment.We will start by building a small introduction application and then proceed to the creation of a fully functional, dynamic responsive web application called ProFitOro. In this application, we will build a Pomodoro timer combined with office workouts. Besides the Pomodoro timer and ProFitOro workouts will enable authentication and collaborative content management. We will explore topics such as Vue reactive data binding, reusable components, routing, and Vuex store along with its state, actions, mutations, and getters. We will create Vue applications using both webpack and Nuxt.js templates while exploring cool hot Nuxt.js features such as code splitting and server-side rendering. We will use Jest to test this application, and we will even revive some trigonometry from our secondary school! While developing the app, you will go through the new grid system of Bootstrap 4 along with Vue.js’ directives. We will connect Vuex store to the Firebase real-time database, data storage, and authentication APIs and use this data later inside the application’s reactive components. Finally, we will quickly deploy our application using the Firebase hosting mechanism.

Building Serverless Architectures. Unleash the power of AWS Lambdas for your applications

Cagatay Gurturk

Over the past years, all kind of companies from start-ups to giant enterprises started their move to public cloud providers in order to save their costs and reduce the operation effort needed to keep their shops open. Now it is even possible to craft a complex software system consisting of many independent micro-functions that will run only when they are needed without needing to maintain individual servers.The focus of this book is to design serverless architectures, and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, along with decision factors to consider. You will learn how to design a serverless application, get to know that key points of services that serverless applications are based on, and known issues and solutions.The book addresses key challenges such as how to slice out the core functionality of the software to be distributed in different cloud services and cloud functions. It covers basic and advanced usage of these services, testing and securing the serverless software, automating deployment, and more.By the end of the book, you will be equipped with knowledge of new tools and techniques to keep up with this evolution in the IT industry.

Ripple Quick Start Guide. Get started with XRP and develop applications on Ripple's blockchain

Febin John James

This book starts by giving you an understanding of the basics of blockchain and the Ripple protocol. You will then get some hands-on experience of working with XRP.You will learn how to set up a Ripple wallet and see how seamlessly you can transfer money abroad. You will learn about different types of wallets through which you can store and transact XRP, along with the security precautions you need to take to keep your money safe.Since Ripple is currency agnostic, it can enable the transfer of value in USD, EUR, and any other currency. You can even transfer digital assets using Ripple. You will see how you can pay an international merchant with their own native currency and how Ripple can exchange it on the ?y. Once you understand the applications of Ripple, you will learn how to create a conditionally-held escrow using the Ripple API, and how to send and cash checks.Finally, you will also understand the common misconceptions people have about Ripple and discover the potential risks you must consider before making investment decisions.By the end of this book, you will have a solid foundation for working with Ripple's blockchain. Using it, you will be able to solve problems caused by traditional systems in your respective industry.

SQL Server 2017 Integration Services Cookbook. Powerful ETL techniques to load and transform data from almost any source

Christian Cote, Dejan Sarka, David Peter Hansen, Matija Lah, ...

SQL Server Integration Services is a tool that facilitates data extraction, consolidation, and loading options (ETL), SQL Server coding enhancements, data warehousing, and customizations. With the help of the recipes in this book, you’ll gain complete hands-on experience of SSIS 2017 as well as the 2016 new features, design and development improvements including SCD, Tuning, and Customizations.At the start, you’ll learn to install and set up SSIS as well other SQL Server resources to make optimal use of this Business Intelligence tools. We’ll begin by taking you through the new features in SSIS 2016/2017 and implementing the necessary features to get a modern scalable ETL solution that fits the modern data warehouse. Through the course of chapters, you will learn how to design and build SSIS data warehouses packages using SQL Server Data Tools. Additionally, you’ll learn to develop SSIS packages designed to maintain a data warehouse using the Data Flow and other control flow tasks. You’ll also be demonstrated many recipes on cleansing data and how to get the end result after applying different transformations. Some real-world scenarios that you might face are also covered and how to handle various issues that you might face when designing your packages.At the end of this book, you’ll get to know all the key concepts to perform data integration and transformation. You’ll have explored on-premises Big Data integration processes to create a classic data warehouse, and will know how to extend the toolbox with custom tasks and transforms.

Java Data Science Cookbook. Explore the power of MLlib, DL4j, Weka, and more

Rushdi Shams

If you are looking to build data sciencemodels that are good for production,Java has come to the rescue. With the aidof strong libraries such as MLlib, Weka,DL4j, and more, you can efficientlyperform all the data science tasks youneed to.This unique book provides modernrecipes to solve your common andnot-so-common data science-relatedproblems. We start with recipes to helpyou obtain, clean, index, and search data.Then you will learn a variety of techniquesto analyze, learn from, and retrieveinformation from data. You will alsounderstand how to handle big data, learndeeply from data, and visualize data.Finally, you will work through uniquerecipes that solve your problems whiletaking data science to production, writingdistributed data science applications,and much more - things that will come inhandy at work.

Mastering OpenCV 3. Get hands-on with practical Computer Vision using OpenCV 3 - Second Edition

Shervin Emami, David Millán Escrivá, Daniel Lelis Baggio, Roy Shilkrot, ...

As we become more capable of handling data in every kind, we are becoming more reliant on visual input and what we can do with those self-driving cars, face recognition, and even augmented reality applications and games. This is all powered by Computer Vision.This book will put you straight to work in creating powerful and unique computer vision applications. Each chapter is structured around a central project and deep dives into an important aspect of OpenCV such as facial recognition, image target tracking, making augmented reality applications, the 3D visualization framework, and machine learning. You’ll learn how to make AI that can remember and use neural networks to help your applications learn.By the end of the book, you will have created various working prototypes with the projects in the book and will be well versed with the new features of OpenCV3.

Practical Site Reliability Engineering. Automate the process of designing, developing, and delivering highly reliable apps and services with SRE

Pethuru Raj Chelliah, Shreyash Naithani, Shailender Singh

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is being touted as the most competent paradigm in establishing and ensuring next-generation high-quality software solutions.This book starts by introducing you to the SRE paradigm and covers the need for highly reliable IT platforms and infrastructures. As you make your way through the next set of chapters, you will learn to develop microservices using Spring Boot and make use of RESTful frameworks. You will also learn about GitHub for deployment, containerization, and Docker containers. Practical Site Reliability Engineering teaches you to set up and sustain containerized cloud environments, and also covers architectural and design patterns and reliability implementation techniques such as reactive programming, and languages such as Ballerina and Rust. In the concluding chapters, you will get well-versed with service mesh solutions such as Istio and Linkerd, and understand service resilience test practices, API gateways, and edge/fog computing.By the end of this book, you will have gained experience on working with SRE concepts and be able to deliver highly reliable apps and services.

Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming. Add powerful, believable, and fun AI entities in your game with the power of Unity 2018! - Fourth Edition

Dr. Davide Aversa, Aung Sithu Kyaw, Clifford Peters

Developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for game characters in Unity 2018 has never been easier. Unity provides game and app developers with a variety of tools to implement AI, from the basic techniques to cutting-edge machine learning-powered agents. Leveraging these tools via Unity's API or built-in features allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating your game's worlds and characters.This fourth edition with Unity will help you break down AI into simple concepts to give you a fundamental understanding of the topic to build upon. Using a variety of examples, the book then takes those concepts and walks you through actual implementations designed to highlight key concepts and features related to game AI in Unity.Further on, you'll learn how to distinguish the state machine pattern and implement one of your own. This is followed by learning how to implement a basic sensory system for your AI agent and coupling it with a Finite State Machine (FSM).Next, you'll learn how to use Unity's built-in NavMesh feature and implement your own A* pathfinding system. You'll then learn how to implement simple ?ocks and crowd dynamics, which are key AI concepts in Unity. Moving on, you'll learn how to implement a behavior tree through a game-focused example. Lastly, you'll apply all the concepts in the book to build a popular game.

Learning PowerShell DSC. Automate deployment and configuration of your servers - Second Edition

James Pogran

The main goal of this book is to teach you to configure, deploy, and manage your system using the new features of PowerShell v5/v6 DSC.This book begins with the basics of PowerShell Desired State Configuration, covering its architecture and components. It familiarizes you with the set of Windows PowerShell language extensions and new Windows PowerShell commands that make up DSC. Then it helps you create DSC custom resources and work with DSC configurations with the help of practical examples. Finally, it describes how to deploy configuration data using PowerShell DSC. Throughout this book, we will be focusing on concepts such as building configurations with parameters, the local configuration manager, and testing and restoring configurations using PowerShell DSC.By the end of the book, you will be able to deploy a real-world application end-to-end and will be familiar enough with the powerful Desired State Configuration platform to achieve continuous delivery and efficiently and easily manage and deploy data for systems.

Apache Spark 2.x Cookbook. Over 70 cloud-ready recipes for distributed Big Data processing and analytics

Rishi Yadav

While Apache Spark 1.x gained a lot of traction and adoption in the early years, Spark 2.x delivers notable improvements in the areas of API, schema awareness, Performance, Structured Streaming, and simplifying building blocks to build better, faster, smarter, and more accessible big data applications. This book uncovers all these features in the form of structured recipes to analyze and mature large and complex sets of data.Starting with installing and configuring Apache Spark with various cluster managers, you will learn to set up development environments. Further on, you will be introduced to working with RDDs, DataFrames and Datasets to operate on schema aware data, and real-time streaming with various sources such as Twitter Stream and Apache Kafka. You will also work through recipes on machine learning, including supervised learning, unsupervised learning & recommendation engines in Spark.Last but not least, the final few chapters delve deeper into the concepts of graph processing using GraphX, securing your implementations, cluster optimization, and troubleshooting.

D3.js 4.x Data Visualization. Learn to visualize your data with JavaScript - Third Edition

Aendrew Rininsland, Swizec Teller

Want to get started with impressive interactive visualizations and implement them in your daily tasks? This book offers the perfect solution-D3.js. It has emerged as the most popular tool for data visualization. This book will teach you how to implement the features of the latest version of D3 while writing JavaScript using the newest tools and techniqueYou will start by setting up the D3 environment and making your first basic bar chart. You will then build stunning SVG and Canvas-based data visualizations while writing testable, extensible code,as accurate and informative as it is visually stimulating. Step-by-step examples walk you through creating, integrating, and debugging different types of visualization and will have you building basic visualizations (such as bar, line, and scatter graphs) in no time.By the end of this book, you will have mastered the techniques necessary to successfully visualize data and will be ready to use D3 to transform any data into an engaging and sophisticated visualization.