Building AI Intensive Python Applications. Create intelligent apps with LLMs and vector databases

Rachelle Palmer, Ben Perlmutter, Ashwin Gangadhar, Nicholas Larew, ...

The era of generative AI is upon us, and this book serves as a roadmap to harness its full potential. With its help, you’ll learn the core components of the AI stack: large language models (LLMs), vector databases, and Python frameworks, and see how these technologies work together to create intelligent applications.The chapters will help you discover best practices for data preparation, model selection, and fine-tuning, and teach you advanced techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to overcome common challenges, such as hallucinations and data leakage. You’ll get a solid understanding of vector databases, implement effective vector search strategies, refine models for accuracy, and optimize performance to achieve impactful results. You’ll also identify and address AI failures to ensure your applications deliver reliable and valuable results. By evaluating and improving the output of LLMs, you’ll be able to enhance their performance and relevance.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to build sophisticated AI applications that deliver real-world value.

MEAN Blueprints. Unlock the power of the MEAN stack by creating attractive and real-world projects

Robert Onodi

The MEAN stack is a combination of the most popular web development frameworks available—MongoDB, Angular, Express, and Node.js used together to offer a powerful and comprehensive full stack web development solution. It is the modern day web dev alternative to the old LAMP stack. It works by allowing AngularJS to handle the front end, and selecting Mongo, Express, and Node to handle the back-end development, which makes increasing sense to forward-thinking web developers. The MEAN stack is great if you want to prototype complex web applications.This book will enable you to build a better foundation for your AngularJS apps. Each chapter covers a complete, single, advanced end-to-end project. You’ll learn how to build complex real-life applications with the MEAN stack and few more advanced projects. You will become familiar with WebSockets and build real-time web applications, as well as create auto-destructing entities. Later, we will combine server-side rendering techniques with a single page application approach. You’ll build a fun project and see how to work with monetary data in Mongo. You will also find out how to a build real-time e-commerce application.By the end of this book, you will be a lot more confident in developing real-time, complex web applications using the MEAN stack.

Software Architecture with C++. Design modern systems using effective architecture concepts, design patterns, and techniques with C++20

Adrian Ostrowski, Piotr Gaczkowski

Software architecture refers to the high-level design of complex applications. It is evolving just like the languages we use, but there are architectural concepts and patterns that you can learn to write high-performance apps in a high-level language without sacrificing readability and maintainability. If you're working with modern C++, this practical guide will help you put your knowledge to work and design distributed, large-scale apps. You'll start by getting up to speed with architectural concepts, including established patterns and rising trends, then move on to understanding what software architecture actually is and start exploring its components. Next, you'll discover the design concepts involved in application architecture and the patterns in software development, before going on to learn how to build, package, integrate, and deploy your components. In the concluding chapters, you'll explore different architectural qualities, such as maintainability, reusability, testability, performance, scalability, and security. Finally, you will get an overview of distributed systems, such as service-oriented architecture, microservices, and cloud-native, and understand how to apply them in application development.By the end of this book, you'll be able to build distributed services using modern C++ and associated tools to deliver solutions as per your clients' requirements.

The Complete Kubernetes Guide. Become an expert in container management with the power of Kubernetes

Jonathan Baier, Gigi Sayfan, Jesse White

If you are running a number of containers and want to be able to automate the way they’re managed, it can be helpful to have Kubernetes at your disposal. This Learning Path guides you through core Kubernetes constructs, such as pods, services, replica sets, replication controllers, and labels. You'll get started by learning how to integrate your build pipeline and deployments in a Kubernetes cluster. As you cover more chapters in the Learning Path, you'll get up to speed with orchestrating updates behind the scenes, avoiding downtime on your cluster, and dealing with underlying cloud provider instability in your cluster. With the help of real-world use cases, you'll also explore options for network configuration, and understand how to set up, operate, and troubleshoot various Kubernetes networking plugins. In addition to this, you'll gain insights into custom resource development and utilization in automation and maintenance workflows.By the end of this Learning Path, you'll have the expertise you need to progress from an intermediate to an advanced level of understanding Kubernetes.This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products:• Getting Started with Kubernetes - Third Edition by Jonathan Baier and Jesse White• Mastering Kubernetes - Second Edition by Gigi Sayfan

Applied SOA Patterns on the Oracle Platform. Fuse together your pragmatic Oracle experience with abstract SOA patterns with this practical guide

Sergey Popov

Practical DevOps. Harness the power of DevOps to boost your skill set and make your IT organization perform better

joakim verona

DevOps is a practical field that focuses on delivering business value as efficiently as possible. DevOps encompasses all the flows from code through testing environments to production environments. It stresses the cooperation between different roles, and how they can work together more closely, as the roots of the word imply—Development and Operations.After a quick refresher to DevOps and continuous delivery, we quickly move on to looking at how DevOps affects architecture. You'll create a sample enterprise Java application that you’ll continue to work with through the remaining chapters. Following this, we explore various code storage and build server options. You will then learn how to perform code testing with a few tools and deploy your test successfully. Next, you will learn how to monitor code for any anomalies and make sure it’s running properly. Finally, you will discover how to handle logs and keep track of the issues that affect processes

Moodle 1.9 for Teaching Special Education Children (5-10): Beginner's Guide. Create courses and therapies for children with special educational needs using Moodle for effective e-learning

Vanesa S. Olsen, Vanesa Soledad Olsen, Moodle Trust

Moodle is a free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. But what does it have to offer to the children with special educational needs who want a fun, inspiring, interactive, and informative learning experience? Moodle 1.9 empowers educators achieve all these set of rich experiences with many related activities - this book shows you how!This book offers solutions to developing interactive courses and therapies for children with special education needs who are between the age group of 5 to 10 years. It teaches to combine Moodle 1.9 with the opportunities offered by Web 2.0, free and commercial software, and general purpose hardware devices. This book will guide the reader step-by-step in using many different tools to create exciting experiences to offer great motivation to children with special educational needs, considering the opportunities for online education.This book will help the reader to build interactive and rich online content oriented to children with special educational needs using different techniques and open source tools. It teaches you to create exercises as if you were playing with children at the school, the zoo, the beach, the supermarket, a birthday party, an aquarium, a farm, at the shopping, a circus or at home. You will be able to work with drawings, music, sounds, videos, photographs and text, and you will combine all these pieces into nice experiences for children who need to find extra motivation to improve their learning skills.Besides, it will teach you to take advantage of general purpose, non-expensive hardware like gamepads, joysticks, digital pens also known as pen-sketches, multi-touch screens, netbooks and touchpads. The usage of some of these hardware devices combined with visually rich activities usually offer children an extra motivation to focus on solving the exercises.

Building Wireless Sensor Networks Using Arduino. Leverage the powerful Arduino and XBee platforms to monitor and control your surroundings

Matthijs Kooijman

Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2 Handbook. This is the only reference you need to implement and manage Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager in your business. Takes you from design to configuration in logical steps, and even covers basic Certificate Management and troubleshooting

Kent Nordstrom, Kent Nordstr?É?íÂ!?m

Microsoft's Forefront Identity Manager simplifies enterprise identity management for end users by automating admin tasks and integrating the infrastructure of an enterprise with strong authentication systems.The Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2 Handbook is an in-depth guide to Identity Management. You will learn how to manage users and groups and implement self-service parts. This book also covers basic Certificate Management and troubleshooting.Throughout the book we will follow a fictional case study. You will see how to implement IM and also set up Smart Card logon for strong administrative accounts within Active Directory. You will learn to implement all the features of FIM 2010 R2. You will see how to install a complete FIM 2010 R2 infrastructure including both test and production environment. You will be introduced to Self-Service management of both users and groups. FIM Reports to audit the identity management lifecycle are also discussed in detail.With the Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2 Handbook you will be able implement and manage FIM 2010 R2 almost effortlessly.

Incident Response in the Age of Cloud. Techniques and best practices to effectively respond to cybersecurity incidents

Dr. Erdal Ozkaya

Cybercriminals are always in search of new methods to infiltrate systems. Quickly responding to an incident will help organizations minimize losses, decrease vulnerabilities, and rebuild services and processes.In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with most organizations gravitating towards remote working and cloud computing, this book uses frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK® and the SANS IR model to assess security risks.The book begins by introducing you to the cybersecurity landscape and explaining why IR matters. You will understand the evolution of IR, current challenges, key metrics, and the composition of an IR team, along with an array of methods and tools used in an effective IR process. You will then learn how to apply these strategies, with discussions on incident alerting, handling, investigation, recovery, and reporting.Further, you will cover governing IR on multiple platforms and sharing cyber threat intelligence and the procedures involved in IR in the cloud. Finally, the book concludes with an “Ask the Experts” chapter wherein industry experts have provided their perspective on diverse topics in the IR sphere.By the end of this book, you should become proficient at building and applying IR strategies pre-emptively and confidently.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting. Everything you need to know to work with reports in Dynamics CRM 2011

Damian Hernan Sinay

All of the data entered into a CRM means nothing if it is unable to report the important information to our managers and executives in such a way that they can easily and quickly get the results they need. A better reporting system would enable them to make the necessary improvements to the processes that any business needs in a dynamic business world.For users and developers wishing to take advantage of using the report capabilities of Dynamics CRM, this is the book for you.Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting is a practical and excellent reference guide that provides you with a number of different options you can use to create and empower the Reporting capabilities of Dynamics CRM. This will give you a good grounding in using the reports in your Dynamics CRM 2011 implementations.This book looks at all the different options we can use to create reports in Dynamics CRM 2011, starting with SQL Reporting Services and custom reports, created in either CRM Report Wizard, SQL Report Builder, or Visual Studio. It will also show other options we can use such as dashboards, charts, and different ways to optimize and automate reports.We will also learn how to build our own reports either using the different wizards for basic reports or using Visual Studio for more complex reports. We will explore the options mobile CRM users have who want to run and see reports on these mobile devices.

Qlik Sense: Advanced Data Visualization for Your Organization. Create smart data visualizations and predictive analytics solutions

Henric Cronström, Ferran Garcia Pagans, Neeraj Kharpate, James Richardson, ...

Qlik Sense is powerful and creative visual analytics software that allows users to discover data, explore it, and dig out meaningful insights in order to make a profit and make decisions for your business. This course begins by introducing you to the features and functions of the most modern edition of Qlik Sense so you get to grips with the application. The course will teach you how to administer the data architecture in Qlik Sense, enabling you to customize your own Qlik Sense application for your business intelligence needs. It also contains numerous recipes to help you overcome challenging situations while creating fully featured desktop applications in Qlik Sense. It explains how to combine Rattle and Qlik Sense Desktop to apply predictive analytics to your data to develop real-world interactive data applications. The course includes premium content from three of our most popular books:[*] Learning Qlik Sense: The Official Guide Second Edition[*] Qlik Sense Cookbook[*] Predictive Analytics using Rattle and Qlik SenseOn completion of this course, you will be self-sufficient in improving your data analysis and will know how to apply predictive analytics to your datasets. Through this course, you will be able to create predictive models and data applications, allowing you to explore your data insights much deeper.

Hyperledger Cookbook. Over 40 recipes implementing the latest Hyperledger blockchain frameworks and tools

Xun (Brian) Wu, Chuanfeng Zhang, Zhibin (Andrew) Zhang

Hyperledger is an open-source project and creates private blockchain applications for a range of domains. This book will be your desk reference as you explore common and not-so-common challenges faced while building blockchain networks using Hyperledger services.We'll work through all Hyperledger platform modules to understand their services and features and build end-to-end blockchain applications using various frameworks and tools supported by Hyperledger. This book's independent, recipe-based approach (packed with real-world examples) will familiarize you with the blockchain development cycle. From modeling a business network to integrating with various tools, you will cover it all. We'll cover common and not-so-common challenges faced in the blockchain life cycle. Later, we'll delve into how we can interact with the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain, covering all the principles you need to master, such as chaincode, smart contracts, and much more. We'll also address the scalability and security issues currently faced in blockchain development.By the end of this book, you will be able to implement each recipe to plan, design, and create a full-fledged, private, decentralized application to meet organizational needs.

Corona SDK Mobile Game Development: Beginner's Guide. You don’t need to be a programming whiz to create iOS and Android games. You just need this great hands-on guide to Corona SDK, which teaches you everything from game physics to successful marketing

Michelle M Fernandez, Michelle M. Fernandez, Anscamobile

Corona SDK is the fastest and easiest way to create commercially successful cross platform mobile games. Just ask Robert Nay, a 14 year old who created Bubble Ball - downloaded three million times, famously knocking Angry Birds off the top spot. You don't need to be a programming veteran to create games using Corona. Corona SDK is the number one tool for creating fun, simple blockbuster games. Assuming no experience at all with programming or game development you will learn the basic foundations of Lua and Corona right through to creating several monetized games deployable to Android and Apple stores. You will begin with a crash course in Lua, the programming language underpinning the Corona SDK tool. After downloading and installing Corona and writing some simple code you will dive straight into game development. You will start by creating a simple breakout game with controls optimized for mobile. You will build on this by creating two more games incorporating different features such as falling physics. The book ends with a tutorial on social network integration, implementing in app purchase and most important of all monetizing and shipping your game to the Android and App stores.

Data Cleaning with Power BI. The definitive guide to transforming dirty data into actionable insights

Gus Frazer

Microsoft Power BI offers a range of powerful data cleaning and preparation options through tools such as DAX, Power Query, and the M language. However, despite its user-friendly interface, mastering it can be challenging. Whether you're a seasoned analyst or a novice exploring the potential of Power BI, this comprehensive guide equips you with techniques to transform raw data into a reliable foundation for insightful analysis and visualization.This book serves as a comprehensive guide to data cleaning, starting with data quality, common data challenges, and best practices for handling data. You’ll learn how to import and clean data with Query Editor and transform data using the M query language. As you advance, you’ll explore Power BI’s data modeling capabilities for efficient cleaning and establishing relationships. Later chapters cover best practices for using Power Automate for data cleaning and task automation. Finally, you’ll discover how OpenAI and ChatGPT can make data cleaning in Power BI easier.By the end of the book, you will have a comprehensive understanding of data cleaning concepts, techniques, and how to use Power BI and its tools for effective data preparation.

Cocos2d-x Cookbook. Over 50 hands-on recipes to help you efficiently administer and maintain your games with Cocos2d-x

Akihiro Matsuura