Blockchain for Decision Makers. A systematic guide to using blockchain for improving your business

Romain Tormen

In addition to cryptocurrencies, blockchain-based apps are being developed in different industries such as banking, supply chain, and healthcare to achieve digital transformation and enhance user experience. Blockchain is not only about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, but also about different technologies such as peer-to-peer networks, consensus mechanisms, and cryptography. These technologies together help sustain trustless environments in which digital value can be transferred between individuals without intermediaries.This book will help you understand the basics of blockchain such as consensus protocols, decentralized applications, and tokenization. You'll focus on how blockchain is used today in different industries and the technological challenges faced while implementing a blockchain strategy. The book also enables you, as a decision maker, to understand blockchain from a technical perspective and evaluate its applicability in your business. Finally, you'll get to grips with blockchain frameworks such as Hyperledger and Quorum and their usability.By the end of this book, you'll have learned about the current use cases of blockchain and be able to implement a blockchain strategy on your own.

Machine Learning on Kubernetes. A practical handbook for building and using a complete open source machine learning platform on Kubernetes

Faisal Masood, Ross Brigoli

MLOps is an emerging field that aims to bring repeatability, automation, and standardization of the software engineering domain to data science and machine learning engineering. By implementing MLOps with Kubernetes, data scientists, IT professionals, and data engineers can collaborate and build machine learning solutions that deliver business value for their organization.You'll begin by understanding the different components of a machine learning project. Then, you'll design and build a practical end-to-end machine learning project using open source software. As you progress, you'll understand the basics of MLOps and the value it can bring to machine learning projects. You will also gain experience in building, configuring, and using an open source, containerized machine learning platform. In later chapters, you will prepare data, build and deploy machine learning models, and automate workflow tasks using the same platform. Finally, the exercises in this book will help you get hands-on experience in Kubernetes and open source tools, such as JupyterHub, MLflow, and Airflow.By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to effectively build, train, and deploy a machine learning model using the machine learning platform you built.

Electron Projects. Build over 9 cross-platform desktop applications from scratch

Denys Vuika

The Electron framework allows you to use modern web technologies to build applications that share the same code across all operating systems and platforms. This also helps designers to easily transition from the web to the desktop. Electron Projects guides you through building cross-platform Electron apps with modern web technologies and JavaScript frameworks such as Angular, React.js, and Vue.js.You’ll explore the process of configuring modern JavaScript frameworks and UI libraries, real-time analytics and automatic updates, and interactions with the operating system. You’ll get hands-on with building a basic Electron app, before moving on to implement a Markdown Editor. In addition to this, you’ll be able to experiment with major JavaScript frameworks such as Angular and Vue.js, discovering ways to integrate them with Electron apps for building cross-platform desktop apps. Later, you’ll learn to build a screenshot snipping tool, a mini-game, and a music player, while also gaining insights into analytics, bug tracking, and licensing. You’ll then get to grips with building a chat app, an eBook generator and finally a simple digital wallet app.By the end of this book, you’ll have experience in building a variety of projects and project templates that will help you to apply your knowledge when creating your own cross-platform applications.

Expert Python Programming. Become a master in Python by learning coding best practices and advanced programming concepts in Python 3.7 - Third Edition

Michał Jaworski, Tarek Ziadé

Python is a dynamic programming language that's used in a wide range of domains thanks to its simple yet powerful nature. Although writing Python code is easy, making it readable, reusable, and easy to maintain is challenging. Complete with best practices, useful tools, and standards implemented by professional Python developers, the third edition of Expert Python Programming will help you overcome this challenge.The book will start by taking you through the new features in Python 3.7. You'll then learn the advanced components of Python syntax, in addition to understanding how to apply concepts of various programming paradigms, including object-oriented programming, functional programming, and event-driven programming. This book will also guide you through learning the naming best practices, writing your own distributable Python packages, and getting up to speed with automated ways to deploy your software on remote servers. You’ll discover how to create useful Python extensions with C, C++, Cython, and CFFI. Furthermore, studying about code management tools, writing clear documentation, and exploring test-driven development will help you write clean code.By the end of the book, you will have become an expert in writing efficient and maintainable Python code.

Learning Continuous Integration with Jenkins

Nikhil Pathania

In past few years, Agile software development has seen tremendous growth across the world. There is huge demand for software delivery solutions that are fast yet flexible to frequent amendments. As a result, CI and continuous delivery methodologies are gaining popularity. Jenkins’ core functionality and flexibility allows it to fit in a variety of environments and can help streamline the development process for all stakeholders.This book starts off by explaining the concepts of CI and its significance in the Agile world with a whole chapter dedicated to it. Next, you’ll learn to configure and set up Jenkins. You’ll gain a foothold in implementing CI and continuous delivery methods. We dive into the various features offered by Jenkins one by one exploiting them for CI. After that, you’ll find out how to use the built-in pipeline feature of Jenkins. You’ll see how to integrate Jenkins with code analysis tools and test automation tools in order to achieve continuous delivery. Next, you’ll be introduced to continuous deployment and learn to achieve it using Jenkins.Through this book’s wealth of best practices and real-world tips, you'll discover how easy it is to implement a CI service with Jenkins.

Google Plus First Look: a tip-packed, comprehensive look at Google+. Get up and running with Google+ fast with this book and

Ralph Roberts

Big Data Analytics with R. Leverage R Programming to uncover hidden patterns in your Big Data

Simon Walkowiak

Big Data analytics is the process of examining large and complex data sets that often exceed the computational capabilities. R is a leading programming language of data science, consisting of powerful functions to tackle all problems related to Big Data processing.The book will begin with a brief introduction to the Big Data world and its current industry standards. With introduction to the R language and presenting its development, structure, applications in real world, and its shortcomings. Book will progress towards revision of major R functions for data management and transformations. Readers will be introduce to Cloud based Big Data solutions (e.g. Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon RDS, Microsoft Azure and its HDInsight clusters) and also provide guidance on R connectivity with relational and non-relational databases such as MongoDB and HBase etc. It will further expand to include Big Data tools such as Apache Hadoop ecosystem, HDFS and MapReduce frameworks. Also other R compatible tools such as Apache Spark, its machine learning library Spark MLlib, as well as H2O.

Learning Material Design. Master Material Design and create beautiful, animated interfaces for mobile and web applications

Kyle Mew

Google's Material Design language has taken the web development and design worlds by storm. Now available on many more platforms than Android, Material Design uses color, light, and movements to not only generate beautiful interfaces, but to provide intuitive navigation for the user.Learning Material Design will teach you the fundamental theories of Material Design using code samples to put these theories into practice.Focusing primarily on Android Studio, you’ll create mobile interfaces using the most widely used and powerful material components, such as sliding drawers and floating action buttons. Each section will introduce the relevant Java classes and APIs required to implement these components. With the rules regarding structure, layout, iconography, and typography covered, we then move into animation and transition, possibly Material Design's most powerful concept, allowing complex hierarchies to be displayed simply and stylishly.With all the basic technologies and concepts mastered, the book concludes by showing you how these skills can be applied to other platforms, in particular web apps, using the powerful Polymer library.

Hands-On Reinforcement Learning for Games. Implementing self-learning agents in games using artificial intelligence techniques

Micheal Lanham

With the increased presence of AI in the gaming industry, developers are challenged to create highly responsive and adaptive games by integrating artificial intelligence into their projects. This book is your guide to learning how various reinforcement learning techniques and algorithms play an important role in game development with Python.Starting with the basics, this book will help you build a strong foundation in reinforcement learning for game development. Each chapter will assist you in implementing different reinforcement learning techniques, such as Markov decision processes (MDPs), Q-learning, actor-critic methods, SARSA, and deterministic policy gradient algorithms, to build logical self-learning agents. Learning these techniques will enhance your game development skills and add a variety of features to improve your game agent’s productivity. As you advance, you’ll understand how deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques can be used to devise strategies to help agents learn from their actions and build engaging games.By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to apply reinforcement learning techniques to build a variety of projects and contribute to open source applications.

RESTful Java Web Services Security. Secure your RESTful applications against common vulnerabilities with this book and

René Enríquez

Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development - Made Simple

Sten E Vesterli

Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook. With this highly focused book you’ll learn how to bring your characters to life using Blender, employing everything from realistic movement to refined eye control. Written in a user-friendly manner, it’s the only guide dedicated to this subject

Virgilio Vasconcelos, Virgilio Carlo de Menezes Vasconcelos, Ton Roosendaal

Blender is an open source 3D graphics application that can be used for modeling, rigging, animating, rendering and thousands of other things. While modeling characters isn't the biggest of your worries, animating them to make them feel as-good-as alive is what differentiates a professional from an amateur. This book offers clear, illustrative, and easy-to-follow recipes to create character rigs and animations for common situations. Bring your characters to life by understanding the principles, techniques and approaches involved in creating rigs and animations, you'll be able to adapt them to your own characters and films. The book offers clear step-by-step tutorials, with detailed explanations, screenshots and support files to help you understand the principles behind each topic. Each recipe covers a logical step of the complete creation of a character rig and animation, so you're not overwhelmed with too much information at once.You'll see numerous examples and screenshots that guide to achieve various rigging and animation tasks, logically separated so you can understand each in detail. The rigging topics are divided by each region of the body (torso, limbs, face, eyes), and further separated by the specific topic (neck, fingers, mouth, eyelids, etc) for clarity. All rigging tasks are accomplished with the built-in tools in Blender, without the complexity of coding custom Python behaviors or user interface elements.The animation topics deal with common situations found in real world productions, showing good practices to understand and overcome the challenges.

Hands-On Web Scraping with Python. Perform advanced scraping operations using various Python libraries and tools such as Selenium, Regex, and others

Anish Chapagain

Web scraping is an essential technique used in many organizations to gather valuable data from web pages. This book will enable you to delve into web scraping techniques and methodologies.The book will introduce you to the fundamental concepts of web scraping techniques and how they can be applied to multiple sets of web pages. You'll use powerful libraries from the Python ecosystem such as Scrapy, lxml, pyquery, and bs4 to carry out web scraping operations. You will then get up to speed with simple to intermediate scraping operations such as identifying information from web pages and using patterns or attributes to retrieve information. This book adopts a practical approach to web scraping concepts and tools, guiding you through a series of use cases and showing you how to use the best tools and techniques to efficiently scrape web pages. You'll even cover the use of other popular web scraping tools, such as Selenium, Regex, and web-based APIs.By the end of this book, you will have learned how to efficiently scrape the web using different techniques with Python and other popular tools.

Qt 5 and OpenCV 4 Computer Vision Projects. Get up to speed with cross-platform computer vision app development by building seven practical projects

Zhuo Qingliang

OpenCV and Qt have proven to be a winning combination for developing cross-platform computer vision applications. By leveraging their power, you can create robust applications with both an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) and high-performance capabilities. This book will help you learn through a variety of real-world projects on image processing, face and text recognition, object detection, and high-performance computing. You’ll be able to progressively build on your skills by working on projects of increasing complexity.You’ll begin by creating an image viewer application, building a user interface from scratch by adding menus, performing actions based on key-presses, and applying other functions. As you progress, the book will guide you through using OpenCV image processing and modification functions to edit an image with filters and transformation features. In addition to this, you’ll explore the complex motion analysis and facial landmark detection algorithms, which you can use to build security and face detection applications. Finally, you’ll learn to use pretrained deep learning models in OpenCV and GPUs to filter images quickly. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to effectively develop full-fledged computer vision applications with OpenCV and Qt.

The C++ Standard Library. What every professional C++ programmer should know about the C++ standard library. - Second Edition

Rainer Grimm

Standard template library enables programmers to speed up application development using the built-in data structures and algorithms in their codes. The C++ Standard Library is a comprehensive guide to the updated library of classes, algorithms, functions, iterators, and containers and serves as the best reference to the current C++ 17 standard. Starting with the introduction and history of the standard library, this book goes on to demonstrate how quickly you can manipulate various C++ template classes while writing your applications. You'll also learn in detail the four types of STL components. Then you'll discover the best methods to analyze or modify a string. You'll also learn how to make your application communicate with the outside world using input and output streams and how to use the non-owning string objects with regular strings. By the end of this book, you'll be able to take your programming skills to a higher level by leveraging the standard C++ libraries.

Business Intelligence with Databricks SQL. Concepts, tools, and techniques for scaling business intelligence on the data lakehouse

Vihag Gupta

In this new era of data platform system design, data lakes and data warehouses are giving way to the lakehouse – a new type of data platform system that aims to unify all data analytics into a single platform. Databricks, with its Databricks SQL product suite, is the hottest lakehouse platform out there, harnessing the power of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake, and other innovations to enable data warehousing capabilities on the lakehouse with data lake economics.This book is a comprehensive hands-on guide that helps you explore all the advanced features, use cases, and technology components of Databricks SQL. You’ll start with the lakehouse architecture fundamentals and understand how Databricks SQL fits into it. The book then shows you how to use the platform, from exploring data, executing queries, building reports, and using dashboards through to learning the administrative aspects of the lakehouse – data security, governance, and management of the computational power of the lakehouse. You’ll also delve into the core technology enablers of Databricks SQL – Delta Lake and Photon. Finally, you’ll get hands-on with advanced SQL commands for ingesting data and maintaining the lakehouse.By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered Databricks SQL and be able to deploy and deliver fast, scalable business intelligence on the lakehouse.