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.

The AI Value Playbook. How to make AI work in the real world

Lisa Weaver-Lambert

Business leaders are challenged by the speed of AI innovation and how to navigate disruption and uncertainty. This book is a crucial resource for those who want to understand how to leverage AI to drive business value, drawn from the firsthand experience of those who have been implementing this technology successfully. The AI Value Playbook focuses on questions frequently posed by leaders and boards. How can businesses adapt to these emerging technologies? How can they start building and deploying AI as a strategic asset to drive efficiency? What risks or threats need to be considered? How quickly can value be created? This book is a response to those demands. In a series of in-depth and wide-ranging conversations with practitioners, from CEOs leading new generative AI-based companies to Data Scientists and CFOs working in more traditional companies. Our experts share their hard-earned wisdom, talking candidly about their successes and failures, and what excites them about the future. These interviews offer unique insights for business leaders to apply to their own organizations. The book distils a value-driven playbook for how AI can be put to work today.

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.

IBM SPSS Modeler Cookbook. If you've already had some experience with IBM SPSS Modeler this cookbook will help you delve deeper and exploit the incredible potential of this data mining workbench. The recipes come from some of the best brains in the business

Keith McCormick, Thomas J Khabaza, Dean Abbott, Meta S. Brown, ...

IBM SPSS Modeler is a data mining workbench that enables you to explore data, identify important relationships that you can leverage, and build predictive models quickly allowing your organization to base its decisions on hard data not hunches or guesswork.IBM SPSS Modeler Cookbook takes you beyond the basics and shares the tips, the timesavers, and the workarounds that experts use to increase productivity and extract maximum value from data. The authors of this book are among the very best of these exponents, gurus who, in their brilliant and imaginative use of the tool, have pushed back the boundaries of applied analytics. By reading this book, you are learning from practitioners who have helped define the state of the art.Follow the industry standard data mining process, gaining new skills at each stage, from loading data to integrating results into everyday business practices. Get a handle on the most efficient ways of extracting data from your own sources, preparing it for exploration and modeling. Master the best methods for building models that will perform well in the workplace.Go beyond the basics and get the full power of your data mining workbench with this practical guide.

Learning NumPy Array. Supercharge your scientific Python computations by understanding how to use the NumPy library effectively

Ivan Idris

Clean Android Architecture. Take a layered approach to writing clean, testable, and decoupled Android applications

Alexandru Dumbravan, Ed Price

As an application’s code base increases, it becomes harder for developers to maintain existing features and introduce new ones. In this clean architecture book, you'll learn to identify when and how this problem emerges and how to structure your code to overcome it.The book starts by explaining clean architecture principles and Android architecture components and then explores the tools, frameworks, and libraries involved. You’ll learn how to structure your application in the data and domain layers, the technologies that go in each layer, and the role that each layer plays in keeping your application clean. You’ll understand how to arrange the code into these two layers and the components involved in assembling them. Finally, you'll cover the presentation layer and the patterns that can be applied to have a decoupled and testable code base.By the end of this architecture book, you'll be able to build an application following clean architecture principles and have the knowledge you need to maintain and test the application easily.

Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect Exam Ref SC-100. Get certified with ease while learning how to develop highly effective cybersecurity strategies

Dwayne Natwick, Rod Trent

Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect Exam Ref SC-100 is a comprehensive guide that will help cybersecurity professionals design and evaluate the cybersecurity architecture of Microsoft cloud services. Complete with hands-on tutorials, projects, and self-assessment questions, you’ll have everything you need to pass the SC-100 exam.This book will take you through designing a strategy for a cybersecurity architecture and evaluating the governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) of the architecture. This will include cloud-only and hybrid infrastructures, where you’ll learn how to protect using the principles of zero trust, along with evaluating security operations and the overall security posture. To make sure that you are able to take the SC-100 exam with confidence, the last chapter of this book will let you test your knowledge with a mock exam and practice questions.By the end of this book, you’ll have the knowledge you need to plan, design, and evaluate cybersecurity for Microsoft cloud and hybrid infrastructures, and pass the SC-100 exam with flying colors.

Implementing Enterprise Observability for Success. Strategically plan and implement observability using real-life examples

Manisha Agrawal, Karun Krishnannair

Observability can be implemented in multiple ways within an organization based on the organization’s needs. So, it’s crucial for organizations to decide whether they need observability and to what extent, what skills and tools will suit them, and how long will it take to implement it. Implementing Enterprise Observability for Success provides a step-by-step approach to help you create an observability strategy, understand the principles behind the creation of the strategy, and logical steps to plan and execute the implementation.You’ll learn about observability fundamentals and challenges, the importance of data and analytics along with different tools. Further, you’ll discover the various layers from which data should be collected for setting up observability.Through real- life examples distilled from the author's experience in implementing observability at an enterprise level, you’ll uncover some of the non-technical & technical drivers of observability like the culture of the organization, the hierarchy of stakeholders, tools at disposal and the willingness to invest.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to plan the observability journey, identify different stakeholders, spot the technology stack required, and lay out an effective plan for organization-wide adoption.

Reimagine Remote Working with Microsoft Teams. A practical guide to increasing your productivity and enhancing collaboration in the remote world

Sathish Veerapandian, Harsharanjeet Kaur, Ashok Madhvarayan, Sriram Rajamanickam

The outbreak of the pandemic has forced the world to embrace remote working and the modern style of virtual business. However, end users may find it challenging to cope with this sudden change in working style, not aware of all the features and remote working tools available to make their life easy. Microsoft Teams is an exceptional platform, adopted by many organizations for unified communication and collaboration, and this book will help you to make the most of its capabilities.Complete with step-by-step explanations and screenshots, this book guides you through the topics that you'll find useful in your daily use of Teams. You'll learn how to manage your teams and projects with Microsoft Teams in a structured and organized way. The book provides hands-on information with a focus on the end user side to help corporate users to increase productivity and become a Microsoft Teams superuser. Finally, you'll explore the most effective ways of using the app with best practices and tips and tricks for making the most of the features available for your scenario.By the end of this Microsoft Teams book, you'll have mastered Microsoft Teams and be fully equipped as a modern collaboration end user to effectively increase your remote work productivity.