Unity Virtual Reality Projects. Explore the world of virtual reality by building immersive and fun VR projects using Unity 3D

Jonathan Linowes

What is consumer “virtual reality�? Wearing a head-mounted display you view stereoscopic 3D scenes. You can look around by moving your head, and walk around using hand controls or motion sensors. You are engaged in a fully immersive experience. On the other hand, Unity is a powerful game development engine that provides a rich set of features such as visual lighting, materials, physics, audio, special effects, and animation for creating 2D and 3D games. Unity 5 has become the leading platform for building virtual reality games, applications and experiences for this new generation of consumer VR devices.Using a practical and project-based approach, this book will educate you about the specifics of virtual reality development in Unity.You will learn how to use Unity to develop VR applications which can be experienced with devices such as the Oculus Rift or Google Cardboard. We will then learn how to engage with virtual worlds from a third person and first person character point of view. Furthermore, you will explore the technical considerations especially important and possibly unique to VR. The projects in the book will demonstrate how to build a variety of VR experiences. You will be diving into the Unity 3D game engine via the interactive Unity Editor as well as C-Sharp programming.By the end of the book, you will be equipped to develop rich, interactive virtual reality experiences using Unity.So, let's get to it!

Platform Engineering for Architects. Crafting modern platforms as a product

Max Körbächer, Andreas Grabner, Hilliary Lipsig

As technology evolves, IT talent shortages and system complexity make it essential to have structured guidance for building scalable, user-focused platforms. This book provides platform engineers and architects with practical strategies to develop internal development platforms that enhance software delivery and operations.You’ll learn how to identify end users, understand their needs, and define platform goals with a focus on self-service solutions for cloud-native environments. Using real-world examples, the book demonstrates how to build platforms within and for the cloud, leveraging Kubernetes. It also explores the benefits of a product-centric approach to platform engineering, emphasizing early end-user involvement and flexible design principles that adapt to future requirements.Additionally, the book covers techniques for maintaining a sustainable platform while minimizing technical debt. By the end, you’ll have the knowledge to design, define, and implement platform capabilities that align with your organization’s goals.

AI-Powered Commerce. Building the products and services of the future with Commerce.AI

Andy Pandharikar, Frederik Bussler

Commerce.AI is a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, trained on over a trillion data points, to help businesses build next-gen products and services. If you want to be the best business on the block, using AI is a must.Developers and analysts working with AI will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide. You'll begin by learning the core themes of new product and service innovation, including how to identify market opportunities, come up with ideas, and predict trends. With plenty of use cases as reference, you'll learn how to apply AI for innovation, both programmatically and with Commerce.AI. You'll also find out how to analyze product and service data with tools such as GPT-J, Python pandas, Prophet, and TextBlob. As you progress, you'll explore the evolution of commerce in AI, including how top businesses today are using AI. You'll learn how Commerce.AI merges machine learning, product expertise, and big data to help businesses make more accurate decisions. Finally, you'll use the Commerce.AI suite for product ideation and analyzing market trends.By the end of this artificial intelligence audiobook, you'll be able to strategize new product opportunities by using AI, and also have an understanding of how to use Commerce.AI for product ideation, trend analysis, and predictions.

PowerShell: Automating Administrative Tasks. The art of automating and managing Windows environments

Michael Shepard, Chendrayan Venkatesan, Sherif Talaat, Brenton J.W. Blawat

Are you tired of managing Windows administrative tasks manually and are looking to automate the entire process? If yes, then this is the right course for you. This learning path starts your PowerShell journey and will help you automate the administration of the Windows operating system and applications that run on Windows. It will get you up and running with PowerShell, taking you from the basics of installation to writing scripts and performing web server automation. You will explore the PowerShell environment and discover how to use cmdlets, functions, and scripts to automate Windows systems. The next installment of the course focuses on gaining concrete knowledge of Windows PowerShell scripting to perform professional-level scripting. The techniques here are packed with PowerShell scripts and sample C# code to automate tasks. You will use .NET classes in PowerShell and C# to manage Exchange Online. In the final section, you will delve into real-world examples to learn how to simplify the management of your Windows environment. You will get to grips with PowerShell’s advanced functions and how to most effectively administer your system. This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products: [*] Getting Started with PowerShell by Michael Shepard [*] Windows PowerShell for .Net Developers Second Edition by Chendrayan Venkatesan and Sherif Talaat[*] Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting by Brenton J.W. Blawat

AWS Cloud Projects. Strengthen your AWS skills through practical projects, from websites to advanced AI applications

Ivo Pinto, Pedro Santos

Tired of resumes getting lost in the pile? This book is your roadmap to building an in-demand AWS portfolio that grabs attention and gets you hired.This comprehensive guide unlocks AWS’s full potential through eight real-world projects designed for developers of all levels. Inside, you'll find invaluable guidance for crafting stunning websites with S3, CloudFront, and Route53. You’ll build robust and scalable applications, such as recipe-sharing platforms, using DynamoDB and Elastic Load Balancing. For streamlined efficiency, the book will teach you how to develop serverless architectures with AWS Lambda and Cognito. Gradually, you’ll infuse your projects with artificial intelligence by creating a photo analyzer powered by Amazon Rekognition. You’ll also automate complex workflows for seamless content translation using Translate, CodePipeline, and CodeBuild. Later, you’ll construct intelligent virtual assistants with Amazon Lex and Bedrock to answer web development queries. The book will also show you how to visualize your data with insightful dashboards built using Athena, Glue, and QuickSight.By the end of this book, you’ll have a portfolio of AWS projects to showcase your cloud skills, making you stand out in today’s competitive job market.

Troubleshooting vSphere Storage. All vSphere administrators will benefit big-time from this book because it gives you clear, practical instructions on troubleshooting a whole host of storage problems. From fundamental to advanced techniques, it's all here

Mike Preston

Virtualization has created a new role within IT departments everywhere; the vSphere administrator. vSphere administrators have long been managing more than just the hypervisor, they have quickly had to adapt to become a ‘jack of all trades' in organizations. More and more tier 1 workloads are being virtualized, making the infrastructure underneath them all that more important. Due to this, along with the holistic nature of vSphere, administrators are forced to have the know-how on what to do when problems occur.This practical, easy-to-understand guide will give the vSphere administrator the knowledge and skill set they need in order to identify, troubleshoot, and solve issues that relate to storage visibility, storage performance, and storage capacity in a vSphere environment.This book will first give you the fundamental background knowledge of storage and virtualization. From there, you will explore the tools and techniques that you can use to troubleshoot common storage issues in today's data centers.You will learn the steps to take when storage seems slow, or there is limited availability of storage. The book will go over the most common storage transport such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS, and explain what to do when you can't see your storage, where to look when your storage is experiencing performance issues, and how to react when you reach capacity. You will also learn about the tools that ESXi contains to help you with this, and how to identify key issues within the many vSphere logfiles.

Moodle 4 E-Learning Course Development. The definitive guide to creating great courses in Moodle 4.0 using instructional design principles - Fifth Edition

Susan Smith Nash

Moodle 4.0 maintains its flexible, powerful, and easy-to-use platform while adding impressive new features to enhance the user experience for student success.This updated edition addresses the opportunities that come with a major update in Moodle 4.0. You'll learn how to determine the best way to use the Moodle platform’s new features and configure your courses to align with your overall goals, vision, and even accreditation review needs. You’ll discover how to plan an effective course with the best mix of resources and engaging assessments that really show what the learner has accomplished, and also keep them engaged and interested. This book will show you how to ensure that your students enjoy their collaborations and truly learn from each other. You'll get a handle on generating reports and monitoring exactly how the courses are going and what to do to get them back on track. While doing this, you can use Moodle 4.0’s new navigation features to help keep students from getting “lost.” Finally, you'll be able to incorporate functionality boosters and accommodate the changing needs and goals of our evolving world.By the end of this Moodle book, you'll be able to build and deploy your educational program to align with learning objectives and include an entire array of course content.

Bootstrap for ASP.NET MVC. Click here to enter text. - Second Edition

Pieter van der Westhuizen

One of the leading open source frontend frameworks, Bootstrap has undergone a significant change and introduced several features that make designing compelling, next-generation UIs much simpler. Integrating Bootstrap with ASP.NET's powerful components can further enhance its capabilities.This book guides you through the process of creating an ASP.NET MVC website from scratch using Bootstrap. After a primer on the fundamentals of Bootstrap, you will learn your way around and create a new ASP.NET MVC project in Visual Studio. You will move on to learn about the various Bootstrap components as well as techniques to include them in your own projects. The book includes practical examples to show you how to use open-source plugins with Bootstrap and ASP.NET MVC and guides you through building an ASP.NET MVC website using Bootstrap, utilizing layout and user-interface components. At the end of this book, you will find some valuable tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your Bootstrap-integrated and ASP.NET MVC-integrated website.

Jumpstart Jamstack Development. Build and deploy modern websites and web apps using Gatsby, Netlify, and Sanity

Christopher Pecoraro, Vincenzo Gambino, Magnus Kongsli Hillestad

Jamstack (JavaScript, API, and Markup) enables web developers to create and publish modern and maintainable websites and web apps focused on speed, security, and accessibility by using tools such as Gatsby, Sanity, and Netlify. Developers working with Jamstack will be able to put their knowledge to good use with this practical guide to static site generation and content management. This Jamstack book takes a hands-on approach to implementation and related methodologies that will have you up and running with modern web development in no time.Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, you'll begin by building an event and venue schema structure, and then expand the functionality, exploring all that the Jamstack has to offer. You’ll learn how an example Jamstack is built, build structured content using Sanity to create a schema, use GraphQL to expose the content, and employ Gatsby to build an event website using page and template components and Tailwind CSS Framework. Lastly, you’ll deploy the website to both, a Netlify server and the Microsoft Static Web Apps Service, and interact with it using Amazon Alexa.By the end of this book, you'll have gained the knowledge and skills you need to install, configure, build, extend, and deploy a simple events website using Jamstack.

Python Made Easy. A First Course in Computer Programming Using Python

Kevin Wilson

Python Made Easy is designed to transform beginners into proficient Python programmers. The journey begins with an introduction to Python, covering basic concepts and syntax that lay the foundation for your coding skills. As you progress, you'll dive into essential programming constructs like data structures, functions, and file handling.In the second phase of the course, you'll explore more complex topics such as object-oriented programming, modules, and libraries. These sections will give you the tools to write efficient, reusable, and modular code. You'll also learn how to handle exceptions, ensuring your programs are robust and error-resistant. Special attention is given to graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and game development, making your Python skills applicable to a wide range of projects.The final part of the course covers advanced topics like debugging, testing, and deploying Python applications. You'll also delve into web development, where you'll learn to build and deploy web applications using Python. The course concludes with valuable video resources to reinforce your learning and provide additional insights. By the end of this course, you'll have a solid understanding of Python and be ready to tackle real-world programming challenges.

Optimizing Databricks Workloads. Harness the power of Apache Spark in Azure and maximize the performance of modern big data workloads

Anirudh Kala, Anshul Bhatnagar, Sarthak Sarbahi

Databricks is an industry-leading, cloud-based platform for data analytics, data science, and data engineering supporting thousands of organizations across the world in their data journey. It is a fast, easy, and collaborative Apache Spark-based big data analytics platform for data science and data engineering in the cloud.In Optimizing Databricks Workloads, you will get started with a brief introduction to Azure Databricks and quickly begin to understand the important optimization techniques. The book covers how to select the optimal Spark cluster configuration for running big data processing and workloads in Databricks, some very useful optimization techniques for Spark DataFrames, best practices for optimizing Delta Lake, and techniques to optimize Spark jobs through Spark core. It contains an opportunity to learn about some of the real-world scenarios where optimizing workloads in Databricks has helped organizations increase performance and save costs across various domains.By the end of this book, you will be prepared with the necessary toolkit to speed up your Spark jobs and process your data more efficiently.

Data Engineering with Google Cloud Platform. A practical guide to operationalizing scalable data analytics systems on GCP

Adi Wijaya

With this book, you'll understand how the highly scalable Google Cloud Platform (GCP) enables data engineers to create end-to-end data pipelines right from storing and processing data and workflow orchestration to presenting data through visualization dashboards.Starting with a quick overview of the fundamental concepts of data engineering, you'll learn the various responsibilities of a data engineer and how GCP plays a vital role in fulfilling those responsibilities. As you progress through the chapters, you'll be able to leverage GCP products to build a sample data warehouse using Cloud Storage and BigQuery and a data lake using Dataproc. The book gradually takes you through operations such as data ingestion, data cleansing, transformation, and integrating data with other sources. You'll learn how to design IAM for data governance, deploy ML pipelines with the Vertex AI, leverage pre-built GCP models as a service, and visualize data with Google Data Studio to build compelling reports. Finally, you'll find tips on how to boost your career as a data engineer, take the Professional Data Engineer certification exam, and get ready to become an expert in data engineering with GCP.By the end of this data engineering book, you'll have developed the skills to perform core data engineering tasks and build efficient ETL data pipelines with GCP.

Learn Selenium. Build data-driven test frameworks for mobile and web applications with Selenium Web Driver 3

UNMESH GUNDECHA, Carl Cocchiaro

Selenium WebDriver 3.x is an open source API for testing both browser and mobile applications. With the help of this book, you can build a solid foundation and learn to easily perform end-to-end testing on web and mobile browsers. You'll begin by focusing on the Selenium Page Object Model for software development. You'll architect your own framework with a scalable driver class, Java utility classes, and support for third-party tools and plugins. Next, you'll design and build a Selenium Grid from scratch to enable the framework to scale and support different browsers, mobile devices, and platforms. You'll also strategize and handle a rich web UI using the advanced WebDriver API, and learn techniques to tackle real-time challenges in WebDriver. Later chapters will guide you through performing different types of testing, such as cross-browser testing, load testing, and mobile testing. Finally, you will be introduced to data-driven testing, using TestNG to create your own automation framework. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be able to design your own automation testing framework and perform data-driven testing with Selenium WebDriver.This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books: • Selenium WebDriver 3 Practical Guide - Second Edition by Unmesh Gundecha• Selenium Framework Design in Data-Driven Testing by Carl Cocchiaro

Performance Testing with JMeter 2.9. If you want to use JMeter for performance testing your software products, this book is a great starting point. You'll get a great grounding in all the fundamentals and gain a wealth of new skills along the way

Bayo Erinle

Performance testing with JMeter 2.9 is critical to the success of any software product launch and continued scalability. Irrespective of the size of the application's user base, it's vital to deliver the best user experience to consumers. Apache JMeter is an excellent testing tool that provides an insight into how applications might behave under load enabling organizations to focus on making adequate preparations.Performance Testing with JMeter 2.9 is a practical, hands-on guide that equips you with all the essential skills needed to effectively use JMeter to test web applications using a number of clear and practical step-by-step guides. It allows you take full advantage of the real power behind Apache JMeter, quickly taking you from novice to master.Performance Testing with JMeter 2.9 begins with the fundamentals of performance testing and gets you acquainted with JMeter. It will guide you through recording realistic and maintainable scripts.You will acquire new skills working with tools such as Vagrant, Puppet, and AWS, allowing you to leverage the cloud to aid in distributed testing. You will learn how to do some BeanShell scripting and take advantage of regular expressions, JMeter properties, and extension points to build comprehensive and robust test suites. Also, you will learn how to test RESTful web services, deal with XML, JSON, file downloads/uploads, and much more. Topics like resource monitoring, distributed testing, managing sessions, and extending JMeter are also covered.Performance Testing with JMeter 2.9 will teach you all you need to know to take full advantage of JMeter for testing web applications, dazzle your co-workers, and impress your boss! You will go from novice to pro in no time.

SwiftUI Cookbook. A guide to solving the most common problems and learning best practices while building SwiftUI apps - Second Edition

Giordano Scalzo, Edgar Nzokwe

SwiftUI provides an innovative and simple way to build beautiful user interfaces (UIs) for all Apple platforms, from iOS and macOS through to watchOS and tvOS, using the Swift programming language. In this recipe-based cookbook, you’ll cover the foundations of SwiftUI as well as the new SwiftUI 3 features introduced in iOS 15 and explore a range of essential techniques and concepts that will help you through the development process.The cookbook begins by explaining how to use basic SwiftUI components. Once you’ve learned the core concepts of UI development, such as Views, Controls, Lists, and ScrollViews, using practical implementations in Swift, you'll advance to adding useful features to SwiftUI using drawings, built-in shapes, animations, and transitions. You’ll understand how to integrate SwiftUI with exciting new components in the Apple development ecosystem, such as Combine for managing events and Core Data for managing app data. Finally, you’ll write iOS, macOS, and watchOS apps by sharing the same SwiftUI codebase.By the end of this SwiftUI book, you'll have discovered a range of simple, direct solutions to common problems encountered when building SwiftUI apps.

Building Analytics Teams. Harnessing analytics and artificial intelligence for business improvement

John K. Thompson, Douglas B. Laney

In Building Analytics Teams, John K. Thompson, with his 30+ years of experience and expertise, illustrates the fundamental concepts of building and managing a high-performance analytics team, including what to do, who to hire, projects to undertake, and what to avoid in the journey of building an analytically sound team. The core processes in creating an effective analytics team and the importance of the business decision-making life cycle are explored to help achieve initial and sustainable success.The book demonstrates the various traits of a successful and high-performing analytics team and then delineates the path to achieve this with insights on the mindset, advanced analytics models, and predictions based on data analytics. It also emphasizes the significance of the macro and micro processes required to evolve in response to rapidly changing business needs.The book dives into the methods and practices of managing, developing, and leading an analytics team. Once you've brought the team up to speed, the book explains how to govern executive expectations and select winning projects.By the end of this book, you will have acquired the knowledge to create an effective business analytics team and develop a production environment that delivers ongoing operational improvements for your organization.