Hands-On Blockchain with Hyperledger. Building decentralized applications with Hyperledger Fabric and Composer

Nitin Gaur, Luc Desrosiers, Venkatraman Ramakrishna, Petr Novotny, ...

Blockchain and Hyperledger technologies are hot topics today. Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Composer are open source projects that help organizations create private, permissioned blockchain networks. These find application in finance, banking, supply chain, and IoT among several other sectors. This book will be an easy reference to explore and build blockchain networks using Hyperledger technologies.The book starts by outlining the evolution of blockchain, including an overview of relevant blockchain technologies. You will learn how to configure Hyperledger Fabric and become familiar with its architectural components. Using these components, you will learn to build private blockchain networks, along with the applications that connect to them. Starting from principles first, you’ll learn to design and launch a network, implement smart contracts in chaincode and much more. By the end of this book, you will be able to build and deploy your own decentralized applications, handling the key pain points encountered in the blockchain life cycle.

Mastering SFML Game Development. Inject new life and light into your old SFML projects by advancing to the next level

Raimondas Pupius

SFML is a cross-platform software development library written in C++ with bindings available for many programming languages. It provides a simple interface to the various components of your PC, to ease the development of games and multimedia applications. This book will help you become an expert of SFML by using all of its features to its full potential. It begins by going over some of the foundational code necessary in order to make our RPG project run. By the end of chapter 3, we will have successfully picked up and deployed a fast and efficient particle system that makes the game look much more ‘alive’. Throughout the next couple of chapters, you will be successfully editing the game maps with ease, all thanks to the custom tools we’re going to be building. From this point on, it’s all about making the game look good. After being introduced to the use of shaders and raw OpenGL, you will be guided through implementing dynamic scene lighting, the use of normal and specular maps, and dynamic soft shadows. However, no project is complete without being optimized first. The very last chapter will wrap up our project by making it lightning fast and efficient.

Mastering Rust. Learn about memory safety, type system, concurrency, and the new features of Rust 2018 edition - Second Edition

Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta

Rust is an empowering language that provides a rare combination of safety, speed, and zero-cost abstractions. Mastering Rust – Second Edition is filled with clear and simple explanations of the language features along with real-world examples, showing you how you can build robust, scalable, and reliable programs. This second edition of the book improves upon the previous one and touches on all aspects that make Rust a great language. We have included the features from latest Rust 2018 edition such as the new module system, the smarter compiler, helpful error messages, and the stable procedural macros. You’ll learn how Rust can be used for systems programming, network programming, and even on the web. You’ll also learn techniques such as writing memory-safe code, building idiomatic Rust libraries, writing efficient asynchronous networking code, and advanced macros. The book contains a mix of theory and hands-on tasks so you acquire the skills as well as the knowledge, and it also provides exercises to hammer the concepts in. After reading this book, you will be able to implement Rust for your enterprise projects, write better tests and documentation, design for performance, and write idiomatic Rust code.

Kali Linux - An Ethical Hacker's Cookbook. End-to-end penetration testing solutions

Himanshu Sharma

With the current rate of hacking, it is very important to pentest your environment in order to ensure advanced-level security. This book is packed with practical recipes that will quickly get you started with Kali Linux (version 2016.2) according to your needs, and move on to core functionalities. This book will start with the installation and configuration of Kali Linux so that you can perform your tests. You will learn how to plan attack strategies and perform web application exploitation using tools such as Burp, and Jexboss. You will also learn how to perform network exploitation using Metasploit, Sparta, and Wireshark. Next, you will perform wireless and password attacks using tools such as Patator, John the Ripper, and airoscript-ng. Lastly, you will learn how to create an optimum quality pentest report! By the end of this book, you will know how to conduct advanced penetration testing thanks to the book’s crisp and task-oriented recipes.

Implementing Qlik Sense. Design, Develop, and Validate BI solutions for consultants

Kaushik Solanki, Ganapati Hegde

Qlik Sense is a leading platform for business intelligence (BI) solutions. Qlik Sense helps organizations in making informed decisions based on the data they have.This book will teach you how to effectively use Qlik for optimum customer satisfaction. You will undergo a metamorphosis from a developer to a consultant who is capable of building the most suitable BI solutions for your clients. The book will take you through several business cases – this will give you enough insight to understand the needs of the client clearly and build a BI solution that meets or exceeds their expectations. Starting from the pre-project activities, you will go to the actual execution of the project, the implementation, and even maintenance. This book will give you all the information you need - from the strategy to requirement gathering to implementing BI solutions using Qlik Sense. The book will empower you to take the right decisions in tricky and diffi cult situations while developing analytics and dashboards.

Hands-On Data Science for Marketing. Improve your marketing strategies with machine learning using Python and R

Yoon Hyup Hwang

Regardless of company size, the adoption of data science and machine learning for marketing has been rising in the industry. With this book, you will learn to implement data science techniques to understand the drivers behind the successes and failures of marketing campaigns. This book is a comprehensive guide to help you understand and predict customer behaviors and create more effectively targeted and personalized marketing strategies.This is a practical guide to performing simple-to-advanced tasks, to extract hidden insights from the data and use them to make smart business decisions. You will understand what drives sales and increases customer engagements for your products. You will learn to implement machine learning to forecast which customers are more likely to engage with the products and have high lifetime value. This book will also show you how to use machine learning techniques to understand different customer segments and recommend the right products for each customer. Apart from learning to gain insights into consumer behavior using exploratory analysis, you will also learn the concept of A/B testing and implement it using Python and R.By the end of this book, you will be experienced enough with various data science and machine learning techniques to run and manage successful marketing campaigns for your business.

Mastering Active Directory. Understand the Core Functionalities of Active Directory Services Using Microsoft Server 2016 and PowerShell

Dishan Francis

Active Directory is a centralized and standardized system that automates networked management of user data, security, and distributed resources and enables interoperation with other directories. If you are aware of Active Directory basics and want to gain expertise in it, this book is perfect for you. We will quickly go through the architecture and fundamentals of Active Directory and then dive deep into the core components, such as forests, domains, sites, trust relationships, OU, objects, attributes, DNS, and replication. We will then move on to AD schemas, global catalogs, LDAP, RODC, RMS, certificate authorities, group policies, and security best practices, which will help you gain a better understanding of objects and components and how they can be used effectively. We will also cover AD Domain Services and Federation Services for Windows Server 2016 and all their new features. Last but not least, you will learn how to manage your identity infrastructure for a hybrid-cloud setup. All this will help you design, plan, deploy, manage operations on, and troubleshoot your enterprise identity infrastructure in a secure, effective manner. Furthermore, I will guide you through automating administrative tasks using PowerShell cmdlets. Toward the end of the book, we will cover best practices and troubleshooting techniques that can be used to improve security and performance in an identity infrastructure.

Learning Concurrency in Python. Build highly efficient, robust, and concurrent applications

Elliot Forbes

Python is a very high level, general purpose language that is utilized heavily in fields such as data science and research, as well as being one of the top choices for general purpose programming for programmers around the world. It features a wide number of powerful, high and low-level libraries and frameworks that complement its delightful syntax and enable Python programmers to create.This book introduces some of the most popular libraries and frameworks and goes in-depth into how you can leverage these libraries for your own high-concurrent, highly-performant Python programs. We'll cover the fundamental concepts of concurrency needed to be able to write your own concurrent and parallel software systems in Python.The book will guide you down the path to mastering Python concurrency, giving you all the necessary hardware and theoretical knowledge. We'll cover concepts such as debugging and exception handling as well as some of the most popular libraries and frameworks that allow you to create event-driven and reactive systems.By the end of the book, you'll have learned the techniques to write incredibly efficient concurrent systems that follow best practices.

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.

Emotional Intelligence for IT Professionals. The must-have guide for a successful career in IT

Emília M. Ludovino

This book will help you discover your emotional quotient (EQ) through practices and techniques that are used by the most successful IT people in the world. It will make you familiar with the core skills of Emotional Intelligence, such as understanding the role that emotions play in life, especially in the workplace. You will learn to identify the factors that make your behavior consistent, not just to other employees, but to yourself. This includes recognizing, harnessing, predicting, fostering, valuing, soothing, increasing, decreasing, managing, shifting, influencing or turning around emotions and integrating accurate emotional information into decision-making, reasoning, problem solving, etc., because, emotions run business in a way that spreadsheets and logic cannot. When a deadline lurks, you’ll know the steps you need to take to keep calm and composed. You’ll find out how to meet the deadline, and not get bogged down by stress. We’ll explain these factors and techniques through real-life examples faced by IT employees and you’ll learn using the choices that they made. This book will give you a detailed analysis of the events and behavioral pattern of the employees during that time. This will help you improve your own EQ to the extent that you don’t just survive, but thrive in a competitive IT industry.

MySQL 8 Cookbook. Over 150 recipes for high-performance database querying and administration

Karthik Appigatla

MySQL is one of the most popular and widely used relational databases in the World today. The recently released MySQL 8 version promises to be better and more efficient than ever before.This book contains everything you need to know to be the go-to person in your organization when it comes to MySQL. Starting with a quick installation and configuration of your MySQL instance, the book quickly jumps into the querying aspects of MySQL. It shows you the newest improvements in MySQL 8 and gives you hands-on experience in managing high-transaction and real-time datasets. If you've already worked with MySQL before and are looking to migrate your application to MySQL 8, this book will also show you how to do that. The book also contains recipes on efficient MySQL administration, with tips on effective user management, data recovery, security, database monitoring, performance tuning, troubleshooting, and more.With quick solutions to common and not-so-common problems you might encounter while working with MySQL 8, the book contains practical tips and tricks to give you the edge over others in designing, developing, and administering your database effectively.

Google Cloud AI Services Quick Start Guide. Build intelligent applications with Google Cloud AI services

Arvind Ravulavaru

Cognitive services are the new way of adding intelligence to applications and services. Now we can use Artificial Intelligence as a service that can be consumed by any application or other service, to add smartness and make the end result more practical and useful.Google Cloud AI enables you to consume Artificial Intelligence within your applications, from a REST API.  Text, video and speech analysis are among the powerful machine learning features that can be used. This book is the easiest way to get started with the Google Cloud AI services suite and open up the world of smarter applications.This book will help you build a Smart Exchange, a forum application that will let you upload videos, images and perform text to speech conversions and translation services. You will use the power of Google Cloud AI Services to make our simple forum application smart by validating the images, videos, and text provided by users to Google Cloud AI Services and make sure the content which is uploaded follows the forum standards, without a human curator involvement.You will learn how to work with the Vision API, Video Intelligence API, Speech Recognition API, Cloud Language Process, and Cloud Translation API services to make your application smarter.By the end of this book, you will have a strong understanding of working with Google Cloud AI Services, and be well on the way to building smarter applications.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 Financial Management. Click here to enter text. - Second Edition

Anju Bala, Cristina Nicolas Lorente, Laura Nicolas Lorente

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is a global Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution that provides small and mid-size businesses with greater control over their finances and a way to simplify their supply chain, manufacturing, and operations.Microsoft Dynamics NAV Financial Management explains all you need to know in order to successfully handle your daily financial management tasks. This book walks you through all the improvements in the latest release and shows you how to apply them in your workplace. You will learn about functionalities including sales and purchase processes, payments, bank account management, reporting taxes, budgets, cash flow, fixed assets, cost accounting, inventory valuation, workflows, sending and receiving electronic documents, and business intelligence. This book comprehensively covers all the financial management features inside the latest version of Dynamics NAV and follows a logical schema. By the time you’re finished this book you will have learned about budgets, cash flow management, currencies, intercompany postings, and accounting implications in areas such as jobs, services, warehousing, and manufacturing.

Windows Server 2016 Administration Fundamentals. Deploy, set up, and deliver network services with Windows Server while preparing for the MTA 98-365 exam and pass it with ease

Bekim Dauti

Windows Server 2016 is the server operating system developed by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems, developed concurrently with Windows 10. This book is designed to get you started with Windows Server 2016. It will prepare you for your MTA 98-365 exam. With step-by-step instructions driven by targeted, easy-to-understand graphics, you will be able to understand the roles, features, functions, and quirks of Windows Server 2016.The book begins with the basics of Windows Server 2016, which includes the installation process and basic configuration. You will then move on to roles and features such as Active Directory, Hyper-V, Remote Access, Storage, and Printer. With the help of real-world examples, you will get to grips with the fundamentals of Windows Server 2016, which will help you solve difficult tasks the easy way. Later, the book also shows you maintenance and troubleshooting tasks, where with the help of best practices you will be able to manage Windows Server 2016 with ease. Each chapter ends with a questionnaire to ensure you make the best use of the content provided. By the end of this book, you will have the knowledge required to administer and manage Windows Server environments.

Mapping with ArcGIS Pro. Design accurate and user-friendly maps to share the story of your data

Amy Rock, Ryan Malhoski

ArcGIS Pro is a geographic information system for working with maps and geographic information. This book will help you create visually stunning maps that increase thelegibility of the stories being mapped and introduce visual and design concepts intoa traditionally scientific, data-driven process. The book begins by outlining the stepsof gathering data from authoritative sources and lays out the workflow of creating a great map. Once the plan is in place you will learn how to organize the Contents Pane in ArcGIS Pro and identify the steps involved in streamlining the production process. Then you will learn Cartographic Design techniques using ArcGIS Pro's feature set to organize thepage structure and create a custom set of color swatches. You will be then exposedto the techniques required to ensure your data is clear and legible no matter the sizeor scale of your map. The later chapters will help you understand the various projectionsystems, trade-offs between them, and the proper applications of them to make sureyour maps are accurate and visually appealing. Finally, you will be introducedto the ArcGIS Online ecosystem and how ArcGIS Pro can utilize it within theapplication. You will learn Smart Mapping, a new feature of ArcGIS Online that willhelp you to make maps that are visually stunning and useful.By the end of this book, you will feel more confident in making appropriate cartographic decisions.

Learning C# 7 By Developing Games with Unity 2017. Learn C# Programming by building fun and interactive games with Unity - Third Edition

Micael DaGraça

Do you want to learn C# programming by creating fun and interactive games using the latest Unity 2017 platform? If so, look no further; this is the right book for you. Get started with programming C# so you can create 2D and 3D games in Unity. We will walk you through the basics to get you started with C# 7 and its latest features. Then, explore the use of C# 7 and its latest functional programming capabilities to create amazing games with Unity 2017.You will create your first C# script for Unity, add objects into it, and learn how to create game elements with it. Work with the latest functional programming features of C# and leverage them for great game scripting.Throughout the book, you will learn to use the new Unity 2017 2D tool set and create an interactive 2D game with it. You will make enemies appear to challenge your player, and discover some optimization techniques for great game performance. At the end, you will learn how to transform a 2D game into 3D, and you will be able to skill up to become a pro C# programmer with Unity 2017!