jMonkeyEngine 3.0 : Beginner's Guide. Whether you want to design 3D games with Java for love or for money, this is the primer you need to start using the free libraries of jMonkeyEngine 3.0. All hands on, all fun – it makes light work of learning

Erlend Sogge Heggen, Ruth Kusterer, Ruth Irene Kusterer

jMonkeyEngine 3.0 is a powerful set of free Java libraries that allows you to unlock your imagination, create 3D games and stunning graphics. Using jMonkeyEngine's library of time-tested methods, this book will allow you to unlock its potential and make the creation of beautiful interactive 3D environments a breeze.jMonkeyEngine 3.0 Beginner's Guide teaches aspiring game developers how to build modern 3D games with Java. This primer on 3D programming is packed with best practices, tips and tricks and loads of example code. Progressing from elementary concepts to advanced effects, budding game developers will have their first game up and running by the end of this book.From basic concepts and project creation to building a complex 3D Game, you will learn to layout 3D scenes, make them interactive and add various multi-media effects.You will find answers to common questions including best practices and approaches, how game characters can act and interact, how to simulate solid walls and physical forces, how to take it online to play over a network and much more.From Zero to Hero, start your journey to make your game idea a reality.

Mastering Azure Machine Learning. Perform large-scale end-to-end advanced machine learning in the cloud with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning

Christoph Körner, Kaijisse Waaijer

The increase being seen in data volume today requires distributed systems, powerful algorithms, and scalable cloud infrastructure to compute insights and train and deploy machine learning (ML) models. This book will help you improve your knowledge of building ML models using Azure and end-to-end ML pipelines on the cloud.The book starts with an overview of an end-to-end ML project and a guide on how to choose the right Azure service for different ML tasks. It then focuses on Azure Machine Learning and takes you through the process of data experimentation, data preparation, and feature engineering using Azure Machine Learning and Python. You'll learn advanced feature extraction techniques using natural language processing (NLP), classical ML techniques, and the secrets of both a great recommendation engine and a performant computer vision model using deep learning methods. You'll also explore how to train, optimize, and tune models using Azure Automated Machine Learning and HyperDrive, and perform distributed training on Azure. Then, you'll learn different deployment and monitoring techniques using Azure Kubernetes Services with Azure Machine Learning, along with the basics of MLOps—DevOps for ML to automate your ML process as CI/CD pipeline.By the end of this book, you'll have mastered Azure Machine Learning and be able to confidently design, build and operate scalable ML pipelines in Azure.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV Administration. A quick guide to install, configure, deploy, and administer Dynamics NAV with ease

Sharan Oberoi, Amit Sachdev

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software product that integrates financial, manufacturing, supply chain management, sales and marketing, project management, human resources, and services management information from across your organization, into a centralized database. It can take hours to browse through documentation and references available online to learn how to install, configure, deploy and administer Dynamics NAV. This book aims to offer quick-start information in one place.You will be amazed to find out how easily you can administer Dynamics NAV using this quick step-by-step guide. This book also has recommendations for software and hardware requirements including operating system considerations and hardware considerations for administering Dynamics NAV to your advantage. It covers some advanced functions to set up periodic activities, common batch jobs, and create object files. It will also guide you to secure your database by creating backups and improving performance with practical examples.First you will look at the considerations for deploying Dynamics NAV and best practices and the most important aspects of every ERP installation. Then you will install Dynamics NAV—client and server components and use Dynamics NAV with the Microsoft Stack.We discuss the Dynamics NAV Security Architecture including security recommendations and best practices. You will then create and restore backups. This book covers some recommendations about performance tuning—using appropriate code syntax, proper hardware sizing, and considerations for writing customized C/AL code while using SQL Server database.Finally, you will set up procedures for scheduling pre-defined reoccurring processes, error and exception handling procedures, and provide mechanisms for automatic data processing on the server. Also, you will learn different methods used in handling, promoting to the database, and creating object files—tables, reports, codeunits, forms, pages, dataports and XMLports.

Mastering Swift 3. Build incredible apps for iOS and OS X

Jon Hoffman

Swift is the definitive language of Apple development today. It’s a vital part of any iOS and OS X developer’s skillset, helping them to build the most impressive and popular apps on the App Store—the sort of apps that are essential to iPhone and iPad users every day. With version 3.0, the Swift team have added new features to improve the development experience—making it easier to get the results you want and customers expect.Inside, you’ll find the key features of Swift 3.0 and quickly learn how to use the newest updates to your development advantage. From Objective-C interoperability to ARC, to closures and concurrency, this advanced Swift guide will develop your expertise and make you more fluent in this vital programming language. We give you in-depth knowledge of some of the most sophisticated elements of Swift development including protocol extensions, error-handling, design patterns, and concurrency, and guide you on how to use and apply them in your own projects. You'll see how even the most challenging design patterns and programming techniques can be used to write cleaner code and to build more performant iOS and OS X applications. By the end of this book, you’ll have a handle on effective design patterns and techniques, which means you’ll soon be writing better iOS and OS X applications with a new level of sophistication and control.

Flutter Cookbook. 100+ step-by-step recipes for building cross-platform, professional-grade apps with Flutter 3.10.x and Dart 3.x - Second Edition

Simone Alessandria

Are you ready to tap into the immense potential of Flutter?With over 1,000 new mobile apps published every day on the Apple and Google Play stores, Flutter is transforming the landscape of app development. It's time for you to join the revolution.Introducing the second edition of Flutter Cookbook, a step-by-step guide designed exclusively for you. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting your coding journey, this book is your ultimate companion. Dive into the latest features of Flutter 3.10 and unlock the secrets to building professional-grade, cross-platform applications.With our recipe-based approach, we'll not only show you how to implement Flutter's features but also explain why they work. Through practical examples and real-world execution, you'll gain a deeper understanding of Flutter's inner workings. From crafting stunning UI/UX with widgets to leveraging hot reload and restart techniques, we'll equip you with best practices and invaluable knowledge.As you progress, you'll learn to efficiently manage data, add interactivity and animations, and integrate essential Flutter plugins like maps, camera, voice recognition and more. And let's not forget the dedicated chapter on implementing MLkit powered by TensorFlow Lite. We'll guide you through building custom machine learning solutions, expanding the capabilities of your apps.By the time you reach the end of this comprehensive Flutter book, you'll have the skills and confidence to write and deliver fully functional apps.

Microsoft Intune Cookbook. Over 75 recipes for configuring, managing, and automating your identities, apps, and endpoint devices

Andrew Taylor

Microsoft Intune is a powerful cloud-managed mobile device management (MDM) tool that empowers you to manage your end-user device estate across various platforms. While it is an excellent platform, the initial setup and configuration can be a daunting process, and mistakes made early on can be more challenging to resolve later. This book addresses these issues by guiding you through the end-to-end configuration of an Intune environment, incorporating best practices and utilizing the latest functionalities.In addition to setting up your environment, you’ll delve into the Microsoft Graph platform to understand the underlying mechanisms behind the web GUI. This knowledge will enable you to automate a significant portion of your daily tasks using PowerShell.By the end of this book, you’ll have established an Intune environment that supports Windows, Apple iOS, Apple macOS, and Android devices. You’ll possess the expertise to add new configurations, policies, and applications, tailoring an environment to your specific requirements. Additionally, you’ll have the ability to troubleshoot any issues that may arise and package and deploy your company applications. Overall, this book is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to learn how to use Microsoft Intune to manage their organization's end-user devices.

Instant Nokogiri. Learning data scraping and parsing in Ruby using the Nokogiri gem

Hunter Powers, S. Hunter Powers

A wealth of information sits waiting on the Internet. Instant Nokogiri helps you access this information today with Nokogiri, a slick and fast HTML and XML parsing engine. Bundled in an easy-to-use Ruby gem, Nokogiri empowers you to combine disparate data sources and gain an unprecedented insight into your Ruby applications.Instant Nokogiri is a hands-on guide to extracting information from the sources available on the Internet, sources that are not traditionally accessible to developers. You will learn the secrets of identifying content, extracting just the right parts, and incorporating the new data in your Ruby applications.Instant Nokogiri provides step-by-step instructions on how to incorporate the power of the Nokogiri gem and data parsing into your Ruby projects. You will learn all the basics of designing a project around data parsing, exploring disparate data sources, and refining strategies and theories. You will also combine your thoughts in a real-world, real-data sample application. This book will examine common Nokogiri and Ruby methods useful in scraping and parsing complete with practical code samples. You will also learn the secrets behind effective caching, rate limiting, and masking your identity. Instant Nokogiri will teach you how to get targeted data out of HTML and into Ruby, as well as tons of tips, tricks, code snippets, and expert advice.

Artificial Intelligence for Robotics. Build intelligent robots using ROS 2, Python, OpenCV, and AI/ML techniques for real-world tasks - Second Edition

Francis X. Govers III, Dr. Kamesh Namuduri

Unlock the potential of your robots by enhancing their perception with cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. From neural networks to computer vision, this second edition of the book equips you with the latest tools, new and expanded topics such as object recognition and creating artificial personality, and practical use cases to create truly smart robots.Starting with robotics basics, robot architecture, control systems, and decision-making theory, this book presents systems-engineering methods to design problem-solving robots with single-board computers. You'll explore object recognition using YOLO and genetic algorithms to teach your robot to identify and pick up objects, leverage natural language processing to give your robot a voice, and master neural networks to classify and separate objects and navigate autonomously, before advancing to guiding your robot arms using reinforcement learning and genetic algorithms. The book also covers path planning and goal-oriented programming to prioritize your robot's tasks, showing you how to connect all software using Python and ROS 2 for a seamless experience.By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to transform your robot into a helpful assistant with NLP and give it an artificial personality, ready to tackle real-world tasks and even crack jokes.

BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner's Guide. Master bleeding edge wireless testing techniques with BackTrack 5

Vivek Ramachandran

Wireless has become ubiquitous in today’s world. The mobility and flexibility provided by it makes our lives more comfortable and productive. But this comes at a cost – Wireless technologies are inherently insecure and can be easily broken. BackTrack is a penetration testing and security auditing distribution that comes with a myriad of wireless networking tools used to simulate network attacks and detect security loopholes. Backtrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner’s Guide will take you through the journey of becoming a Wireless hacker. You will learn various wireless testing methodologies taught using live examples, which you will implement throughout this book. The engaging practical sessions very gradually grow in complexity giving you enough time to ramp up before you get to advanced wireless attacks.This book will take you through the basic concepts in Wireless and creating a lab environment for your experiments to the business of different lab sessions in wireless security basics, slowly turn on the heat and move to more complicated scenarios, and finally end your journey by conducting bleeding edge wireless attacks in your lab.There are many interesting and new things that you will learn in this book – War Driving, WLAN packet sniffing, Network Scanning, Circumventing hidden SSIDs and MAC filters, bypassing Shared Authentication, Cracking WEP and WPA/WPA2 encryption, Access Point MAC spoofing, Rogue Devices, Evil Twins, Denial of Service attacks, Viral SSIDs, Honeypot and Hotspot attacks, Caffe Latte WEP Attack, Man-in-the-Middle attacks, Evading Wireless Intrusion Prevention systems and a bunch of other cutting edge wireless attacks.If you were ever curious about what wireless security and hacking was all about, then this book will get you started by providing you with the knowledge and practical know-how to become a wireless hacker.

The Oracle Universal Content Management Handbook. Build, Administer, and Manage Oracle Stellent UCM Solutions

Dmitri Khanine

Oracle UCM is a world-leading Enterprise Content Management platform. From Document Management, Web, Records, and more—Oracle has got all your business needs covered. Oracle UCM enables your organization to efficiently manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents.Written by Oracle ACE Dmitri Khanine, this book is a complete practical guide to building an ECM system and successfully configuring, administering, and operating it. It also shows you how to efficiently manage your organization's content and customize the UCM to fit your needs.This book wastes no time in getting you up and running and dives straight into the installation of the content server in Chapter 1. In the second chapter, you will master all the major controls and the admin interface. Metadata—a very important ingredient of any ECM—is thoroughly covered in Chapter 3. The book then moves on to the important tasks of securing your ECM system, configuring and managing workflows, and understanding and implementing virtual folders. The book also gives you an under-the-hood view of Stellent in Chapter 7. In the later chapters, you will learn how to migrate content like a pro and easily customize Oracle ECM. A bonus addition to the book is the final chapter, which is an easy-to-follow primer on web content management.

Mastering Prometheus. Gain expert tips to monitoring your infrastructure, applications, and services

William Hegedus

With an increased focus on observability and reliability, establishing a scalable and reliable monitoring environment is more important than ever. Over the last decade, Prometheus has emerged as the leading open-source, time-series based monitoring software catering to this demand. This book is your guide to scaling, operating, and extending Prometheus from small on-premises workloads to multi-cloud globally distributed workloads and everything in between.Starting with an introduction to Prometheus and its role in observability, the book provides a walkthrough of its deployment. You’ll explore Prometheus’s query language and TSDB data model, followed by dynamic service discovery for monitoring targets and refining alerting through custom templates and formatting. The book then demonstrates horizontal scaling of Prometheus via sharding and federation, while equipping you with debugging techniques and strategies to fine-tune data ingestion. Advancing through the chapters, you’ll manage Prometheus at scale through CI validations and templating with Jsonnet, and integrate Prometheus with other projects such as OpenTelemetry, Thanos, VictoriaMetrics, and Mimir.By the end of this book, you’ll have practical knowledge of Prometheus and its ecosystem, which will help you discern when, why, and how to scale it to meet your ever-growing needs.

Python Natural Language Processing Cookbook. Over 60 recipes for building powerful NLP solutions using Python and LLM libraries - Second Edition

Zhenya Antić, Saurabh Chakravarty

Harness the power of Natural Language Processing to overcome real-world text analysis challenges with this recipe-based roadmap written by two seasoned NLP experts with vast experience transforming various industries with their NLP prowess.You’ll be able to make the most of the latest NLP advancements, including large language models (LLMs), and leverage their capabilities through Hugging Face transformers. Through a series of hands-on recipes, you’ll master essential techniques such as extracting entities and visualizing text data. The authors will expertly guide you through building pipelines for sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and question-answering using popular libraries like spaCy, Gensim, and NLTK. You’ll also learn to implement RAG pipelines to draw out precise answers from a text corpus using LLMs.This second edition expands your skillset with new chapters on cutting-edge LLMs like GPT-4, Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and Explainable AI (XAI)—fostering trust and transparency in your NLP models.By the end of this book, you'll be equipped with the skills to apply advanced text processing techniques, use pre-trained transformer models, build custom NLP pipelines to extract valuable insights from text data to drive informed decision-making.

Instant CloudFlare Starter. A practical guide for using CloudFlare to effectively secure and speed up your website

Jeffrey Dickey

Ensuring your website is up, fast, and secure is a difficult yet crucial task. Learning how to protect and safeguard your web presence from malicious attackers whilst also making sure that it is optimized is important for any website administrator. CloudFlare helps you augment your website with additional security, as well as provide the extra bit of speed that will set you apart from the competition.Instant CloudFlare Starter will show you how to leverage the power of the cloud to ensure that your website is running at its very best. It will also tell you exactly what CloudFlare is doing when you enable various features, and guide you through the entire setup and configuration process.After learning about what CloudFlare actually is, you'll be shown how to fully optimize and secure your own website - using the latest that CloudFlare has to offer.As well as ensuring that your own site is protected with CloudFlare, you'll learn exactly how it actually secures your website from malicious attackers. This is in addition to making sure that you can send and receive emails effectively from your own domain, as well as learning how CloudFlare can enable your site’s static assets to load quickly, with little effort on your part.You'll be guided through the whole optimization process - with additional tips and guidance that help you avoid common mistakes and pitfalls, alongside coverage of optional modules that can additionally improve the speed of your website, add analytics, or even entirely new functionality.With detailed explanations of things to look out for and how CloudFlare can solve your problems on your website, CloudFlare Starter will ultimately show you how to optimize and secure your website effectively with minimum hassle.

Building Virtual Pentesting Labs for Advanced Penetration Testing. Click here to enter text. - Second Edition

Kevin Cardwell

Security flaws and new hacking techniques emerge overnight – security professionals need to make sure they always have a way to keep . With this practical guide, learn how to build your own virtual pentesting lab environments to practice and develop your security skills. Create challenging environments to test your abilities, and overcome them with proven processes and methodologies used by global penetration testing teams. Get to grips with the techniques needed to build complete virtual machines perfect for pentest training. Construct and attack layered architectures, and plan specific attacks based on the platforms you’re going up against. Find new vulnerabilities for different kinds of systems and networks, and what these mean for your clients.Driven by a proven penetration testing methodology that has trained thousands of testers, Building Virtual Labs for Advanced Penetration Testing, Second Edition will prepare you for participation in professional security teams.

Effective Angular. Develop applications of any size by effectively using Angular with Nx, RxJS, NgRx, and Cypress

Roberto Heckers

Angular is an open-source, front-end framework used to build web applications using TypeScript. Angular is a component-based framework, which means you build apps by developing and composing reusable components. This framework has all the built-in features needed to develop complex, feature-rich web apps. Written by an Angular specialist working with some of the top companies in the Netherlands, this book teaches you how to harness the full potential of the Angular framework.You’ll explore different front-end architecture designs and set up a scalable environment for Angular applications and libraries using Nx, before taking a deep dive into the framework's newest and most powerful features. Next, you’ll learn to manipulate the Document Object Model (DOM) with Angular directives, pipes, and animations, and build reusable components like a pro. The book spotlights best practices and flags potential pitfalls at every step of the way. You’ll also learn design patterns that fit well when using the Angular framework, reactive programming with RxJS and Angular signals, and how to manage application states effectively. The book teaches you about accessibility, testing, and optimizing your app for deployment.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to use Angular effectively to build enterprise-ready, scalable front-end applications.

Flash Multiplayer Virtual Worlds. Build immersive, full-featured interactive worlds for games, online communities, and more

Makzan Makzan (Mak Seng Hin), Seng Hin Mak

Flash virtual worlds are some of the most exciting—and profitable—online business being built today. Using Flash, developers can build interactive environments where users can interact with the virtual world and one another, compete, and have fun. Creating a playful environment on an electronic network presents unique challenges as you combine a fun, upbeat frontend with some serious and complex server logic.This handy book assists you in building amazing virtual worlds in no time by implementing ActionScripts in a Flash IDE. With this book in hand, you will build virtual worlds that have avatars walking around and interacting with non playing characters, completing challenging quests, and allowing users to link with real-world friends.The fun begins with first exploring existing virtual world games such as Club Penguin, Mole, Dofus, and World of Warcraft. We will then design our virtual environment. Then we will create avatars and move the avatars in the virtual world. We will add some triggers to add amusement and life to the virtual world. We will allow the avatars to interact with other players and create a buddy list for each user. Then we will integrate buildings and other environment to the virtual world. We will also let the players interact with non-player characters to complete some tasks. Finally, we move on to add interesting quests to the virtual world, which need to be accomplished by the player to gear up to the next level of the game.This example-rich, hands-on guide sequentially develops a multiplayer virtual world—the platform, the environment, quests, avatars, non-playing characters, and interaction between them.