Deep Learning for Computer Vision. Expert techniques to train advanced neural networks using TensorFlow and Keras

Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani

Deep learning has shown its power in several application areas of Artificial Intelligence, especially in Computer Vision. Computer Vision is the science of understanding and manipulating images, and finds enormous applications in the areas of robotics, automation, and so on. This book will also show you, with practical examples, how to develop Computer Vision applications by leveraging the power of deep learning. In this book, you will learn different techniques related to object classification, object detection, image segmentation, captioning, image generation, face analysis, and more. You will also explore their applications using popular Python libraries such as TensorFlow and Keras. This book will help you master state-of-the-art, deep learning algorithms and their implementation.

Git Essentials. Create, merge, and distribute code with Git, the most powerful and flexible versioning system available - Second Edition

Ferdinando Santacroce

Since its inception, Git has attracted skilled developers due to its robust, powerful, and reliable features. Its incredibly fast branching ability transformed a piece of code from a niche tool for Linux Kernel developers into a mainstream distributed versioning system. Like most powerful tools, Git can be hard to approach since it has a lot of commands, subcommands, and options that easily confuse newcomers.The 2nd edition of this very successful book will help you overcome this fear and become adept in all the basic tasks in Git. Building upon the success of the first book, we start with a brief step-by-step installation guide; after this, you'll delve into the essentials of Git. For those of you who have bought the first edition, this time we go into internals in far greater depth, talking less about theory and using much more practical examples.The book serves as a primer for topics to follow, such as branching and merging, creating and managing a GitHub personal repository, and fork and pull requests. You’ll then learn the art of cherry-picking, taking only the commits you want, followed by Git blame. Finally, we'll see how to interoperate with a Subversion server, covering the concepts and commands needed to convert an SVN repository into a Git repository.To conclude, this is a collection of resources, links, and appendices to satisfy even the most curious.

Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1. Build drones with Ardupilot

Ty Audronis

The Ardupilot platform is an application ecosystem that encompasses various OS projects for drone programming, flight control, and advanced functionalities.The Ardupilot platform supports many Comms and APIs, such as DroneKit, ROS, and MAVLink. It unites OS drone projects to provide a common codebase. With the help of this book, you will have the satisfaction of building a drone from scratch and exploring its many recreational uses (aerial photography, playing, aerial surveillance, and so on). This book helps individuals and communities build powerfulUAVs for both personal and commercial purposes. You will learn to unleash the Ardupilot technology for building,monitoring, and controlling your drones.This is a step-by-step guide covering practical examples and instructions for assembling a drone, building ground control unit using microcontrollers, QgroundControl, and MissionPlanner.You can further build robotic applications on your drone utilizing critical software libraries and tools from the ROS framework. With the help of DroneKit and MAVLink (for reliable communication), you can customize applications via cloud and mobile to interact with your UAV.

Python for Finance. Apply powerful finance models and quantitative analysis with Python - Second Edition

Yuxing Yan

This book uses Python as its computational tool. Since Python is free, any school ororganization can download and use it. This book is organized according to various finance subjects. In other words, the first edition focuses more on Python, while the second edition is truly trying to apply Python to finance.The book starts by explaining topics exclusively related to Python. Then we deal with critical parts of Python, explaining concepts such as time value of money stock and bond evaluations, capital asset pricing model, multi-factor models, time series analysis, portfolio theory,options and futures.This book will help us to learn or review the basics of quantitative finance and apply Python to solve various problems, such as estimating IBM’s market risk,running a Fama-French 3-factor, 5-factor, or Fama-French-Carhart 4 factor model, estimating the VaR of a 5-stock portfolio, estimating the optimal portfolio, and constructing the efficient frontier for a 20-stock portfolio with real-world stock, and with Monte Carlo Simulation. Later, we will also learn how to replicate the famous Black-Scholes-Merton option model and how to price exotic options such as the average price call option.

Hands-On Bug Hunting for Penetration Testers. A practical guide to help ethical hackers discover web application security flaws

Joe Marshall

Bug bounties have quickly become a critical part of the security economy. This book shows you how technical professionals with an interest in security can begin productively—and profitably—participating in bug bounty programs.You will learn about SQli, NoSQLi, XSS, XXE, and other forms of code injection. You’ll see how to create CSRF PoC HTML snippets, how to discover hidden content (and what to do with it once it’s found), and how to create the tools for automated pentesting work?ows.Then, you’ll format all of this information within the context of a bug report that will have the greatest chance of earning you cash. With detailed walkthroughs that cover discovering, testing, and reporting vulnerabilities, this book is ideal for aspiring security professionals. You should come away from this work with the skills you need to not only find the bugs you're looking for, but also the best bug bounty programs to participate in, and how to grow your skills moving forward in freelance security research.

Expert Data Visualization. Advanced information visualization with D3.js 4.x

Jos Dirksen

Do you want to make sense of your data? Do you want to create interactive charts, data trees, info-graphics, geospatial charts, and maps efficiently? This book is your ideal choice to master interactive data visualization with D3.js V4. The book includes a number of extensive examples that to help you hone your skills with data visualization. Throughout nine chapters these examples will help you acquire a clear practical understanding of the various techniques, tools and functionality provided by D3.js. You will first setup your D3.JS development environment and learn the basic patterns needed to visualize your data. After that you will learn techniques to optimize different processes such as working with selections; animating data transitions; creating graps and charts, integrating external resources (static as well as streaming); visualizing information on maps; working with colors and scales; utilizing the different D3.js APIs; and much more. The book will also guide you through creating custom graphs and visualizations, and show you how to go from the raw data to beautiful visualizations. The extensive examples will include working with complex and realtime data streams, such as seismic data, geospatial data, scientific data, and more. Towards the end of the book, you will learn to add more functionality on top of D3.js by using it with other external libraries and integrating it with Ecmascript 6 and Typescript

Learn PowerShell Core 6.0. Automate and control administrative tasks using DevOps principles

David das Neves, Jan-Hendrik Peters

Beginning with an overview of the different versions of PowerShell, Learn PowerShell Core 6.0 introduces you to VSCode and then dives into helping you understand the basic techniques in PowerShell scripting. You will cover advanced coding techniques, learn how to write reusable code as well as store and load data with PowerShell.This book will help you understand PowerShell security and Just Enough Administration, enabling you to create your own PowerShell repository. The last set of chapters will guide you in setting up, configuring, and working with Release Pipelines in VSCode and VSTS, and help you understand PowerShell DSC. In addition to this, you will learn how to use PowerShell with Windows, Azure, Microsoft Online Services, SCCM, and SQL Server. The final chapter will provide you with some use cases and pro tips.By the end of this book, you will be able to create professional reusable code using security insight and knowledge of working with PowerShell Core 6.0 and its most important capabilities.

Julia Programming Projects. Learn Julia 1.x by building apps for data analysis, visualization, machine learning, and the web

Adrian Salceanu

Julia is a new programming language that offers a unique combination of performance and productivity. Its powerful features, friendly syntax, and speed are attracting a growing number of adopters from Python, R, and Matlab, effectively raising the bar for modern general and scientific computing.After six years in the making, Julia has reached version 1.0. Now is the perfect time to learn it, due to its large-scale adoption across a wide range of domains, including fintech, biotech, education, and AI.Beginning with an introduction to the language, Julia Programming Projects goes on to illustrate how to analyze the Iris dataset using DataFrames. You will explore functions and the type system, methods, and multiple dispatch while building a web scraper and a web app. Next, you'll delve into machine learning, where you'll build a books recommender system. You will also see how to apply unsupervised machine learning to perform clustering on the San Francisco business database. After metaprogramming, the final chapters will discuss dates and time, time series analysis, visualization, and forecasting.We'll close with package development, documenting, testing and benchmarking.By the end of the book, you will have gained the practical knowledge to build real-world applications in Julia.

Docker for Serverless Applications. Containerize and orchestrate functions using OpenFaas, OpenWhisk, and Fn

Chanwit Kaewkasi

Serverless applications have gained a lot of popularity among developers and are currently the buzzwords in the tech market. Docker and serverless are two terms that go hand-in-hand.This book will start by explaining serverless and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) concepts, and why they are important. Then, it will introduce the concepts of containerization and how Docker fits into the Serverless ideology. It will explore the architectures and components of three major Docker-based FaaS platforms, how to deploy and how to use their CLI. Then, this book will discuss how to set up and operate a production-grade Docker cluster. We will cover all concepts of FaaS frameworks with practical use cases, followed by deploying and orchestrating these serverless systems using Docker. Finally, we will also explore advanced topics and prototypes for FaaS architectures in the last chapter.By the end of this book, you will be in a position to build and deploy your own FaaS platform using Docker.

Learn Web Development with Python. Get hands-on with Python Programming and Django web development

Fabrizio Romano, Gaston C. Hillar, Arun Ravindran

If you want to develop complete Python web apps with Django, this Learning Path is for you. It will walk you through Python programming techniques and guide you in implementing them when creating 4 professional Django projects, teaching you how to solve common problems and develop RESTful web services with Django and Python. You will learn how to build a blog application, a social image bookmarking website, an online shop, and an e-learning platform.Learn Web Development with Python will get you started with Python programming techniques, show you how to enhance your applications with AJAX, create RESTful APIs, and set up a production environment for your Django projects. Last but not least, you’ll learn the best practices for creating real-world applications.By the end of this Learning Path, you will have a full understanding of how Django works and how to use it to build web applications from scratch.This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products:• Learn Python Programming by Fabrizio Romano• Django RESTful Web Services by Gastón C. Hillar• Django Design Patterns and Best Practices by Arun Ravindran

Advanced Python Programming. Build high performance, concurrent, and multi-threaded apps with Python using proven design patterns

Dr. Gabriele Lanaro, Quan Nguyen, Sakis Kasampalis

This Learning Path shows you how to leverage the power of both native and third-party Python libraries for building robust and responsive applications. You will learn about profilers and reactive programming, concurrency and parallelism, as well as tools for making your apps quick and efficient. You will discover how to write code for parallel architectures using TensorFlow and Theano, and use a cluster of computers for large-scale computations using technologies such as Dask and PySpark. With the knowledge of how Python design patterns work, you will be able to clone objects, secure interfaces, dynamically choose algorithms, and accomplish much more in high performance computing.By the end of this Learning Path, you will have the skills and confidence to build engaging models that quickly offer efficient solutions to your problems.This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products:• Python High Performance - Second Edition by Gabriele Lanaro• Mastering Concurrency in Python by Quan Nguyen• Mastering Python Design Patterns by Sakis Kasampalis

Augmented Reality for Developers. Build practical augmented reality applications with Unity, ARCore, ARKit, and Vuforia

Jonathan Linowes, Krystian Babilinski

Augmented Reality brings with it a set of challenges that are unseen and unheard of for traditional web and mobile developers. This book is your gateway to Augmented Reality development—not a theoretical showpiece for your bookshelf, but a handbook you will keep by your desk while coding and architecting your first AR app and for years to come.The book opens with an introduction to Augmented Reality, including markets, technologies, and development tools. You will begin by setting up your development machine for Android, iOS, and Windows development, learning the basics of using Unity and the Vuforia AR platform as well as the open source ARToolKit and Microsoft Mixed Reality Toolkit. You will also receive an introduction to Apple's ARKit and Google's ARCore! You will then focus on building AR applications, exploring a variety of recognition targeting methods. You will go through multiple complete projects illustrating key market sectors including business marketing, education, industrial training, and gaming. By the end of the book, you will have gained the necessary knowledge to make quality content appropriate for a range of AR devices, platforms, and intended uses.

Blockchain across Oracle. Understand the details and implications of the Blockchain for Oracle developers and customers

Robert van Molken

Blockchain across Oracle gives you the professional orientation to Blockchain that you need as an Oracle developer in today’s changing world. Written and prepared for you by Oracle Developer Champion Robert van Mölken, this book gets you up to speed with the details of the Blockchain - core concepts, how to implement Oracle’s Blockchain Cloud Service, industry implications for the Blockchain, and how the Blockchain will affect your Oracle customers.Robert van Mölken introduces you to the history and concepts of the Blockchain. You’ll really get to understand the Blockchain inside and out, as an Oracle developer or solution architect. You’ll understand the Blockchain flow, and how the hashes and chains create a new decentralised paradigm for you as an Oracle developer. You’ll gain insights into how the Blockchain affects Oracle developers and customers in this modern and disruptive era. You’ll see how the Blockchain concepts work in this new world where Assets, Transactions, Security, and Privacy, can all be sustained across a decentralized system for your customers.Then you'll find a detailed look at the cutting-edge Oracle middleware solutions. You’ll learn about Hyperledger Fabric, the opensource Blockchain framework used by Oracle as its core, and how to set up your own Oracle Blockchain Network. You’ll design and develop a smart contract, and learn how to run it on the Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service.The final part of the book looks at how the Blockchain will affect your customers across various industry sectors. By studying industry trends in the financial services sector, healthcare industry, and the transport industry, you’ll discover how the options and possibilities for you and your clients are being transformed by the Blockchain across Oracle. You’ll complete this professional orientation by looking at Blockchain trends and future directions.

Spring 5.0 Cookbook. Recipes to build, test, and run Spring applications efficiently

Sherwin John C.Tragura

The Spring framework has been the go-to framework for Java developers for quite some time. It enhances modularity, provides more readable code, and enables the developer to focus on developing the application while the underlying framework takes care of transaction APIs, remote APIs, JMX APIs, and JMS APIs. The upcoming version of the Spring Framework has a lot to offer, above and beyond the platform upgrade to Java 9, and this book will show you all you need to know to overcome common to advanced problems you might face.Each recipe will showcase some old and new issues and solutions, right from configuring Spring 5.0 container to testing its components. Most importantly, the book will highlight concurrent processes, asynchronous MVC and reactive programming using Reactor Core APIs. Aside from the core components, this book will also include integration of third-party technologies that are mostly needed in building enterprise applications. By the end of the book, the reader will not only be well versed with the essential concepts of Spring, but will also have mastered its latest features in a solution-oriented manner.

Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow. Teach language to machines using Python's deep learning library

Thushan Ganegedara

Natural language processing (NLP) supplies the majority of data available to deep learning applications, while TensorFlow is the most important deep learning framework currently available. Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow brings TensorFlow and NLP together to give you invaluable tools to work with the immense volume of unstructured data in today’s data streams, and apply these tools to specific NLP tasks.Thushan Ganegedara starts by giving you a grounding in NLP and TensorFlow basics. You'll then learn how to use Word2vec, including advanced extensions, to create word embeddings that turn sequences of words into vectors accessible to deep learning algorithms. Chapters on classical deep learning algorithms, like convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN), demonstrate important NLP tasks as sentence classification and language generation. You will learn how to apply high-performance RNN models, like long short-term memory (LSTM) cells, to NLP tasks. You will also explore neural machine translation and implement a neural machine translator.After reading this book, you will gain an understanding of NLP and you'll have the skills to apply TensorFlow in deep learning NLP applications, and how to perform specific NLP tasks.

Jupyter Cookbook. Over 75 recipes to perform interactive computing across Python, R, Scala, Spark, JavaScript, and more

Dan Toomey

Jupyter has garnered a strong interest in the data science community of late, as it makes common data processing and analysis tasks much simpler. This book is for data science professionals who want to master various tasks related to Jupyter to create efficient, easy-to-share, scientific applications.The book starts with recipes on installing and running the Jupyter Notebook system on various platforms and configuring the various packages that can be used with it. You will then see how you can implement different programming languages and frameworks, such as Python, R, Julia, JavaScript, Scala, and Spark on your Jupyter Notebook. This book contains intuitive recipes on building interactive widgets to manipulate and visualize data in real time, sharing your code, creating a multi-user environment, and organizing your notebook. You will then get hands-on experience with Jupyter Labs, microservices, and deploying them on the web. By the end of this book, you will have taken your knowledge of Jupyter to the next level to perform all key tasks associated with it.