XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide. The best way to start creating your own games is simply to dive in and give it a go with this Beginner’s Guide to XNA. Full of examples, tips, and tricks for a solid grounding

Kurt Jaegers

XNA Game Studio enables hobbyists and independent game developers to easily create video games. It gives you the power to bring your creations to life on Windows, the Xbox 360, the Zune, and the Windows Phone platforms. But before you give life to your creativity with XNA, you need to gain a solid understanding of some game development concepts.This book covers both the concepts and the implementations necessary to get you started on bringing your own creations to life with XNA. It details the creation of four games, all in different styles, from start to finish using the Microsoft XNA Framework, including a puzzler, space shooter, multi-axis shoot-'em-up, and a jump-and-run platform game. Each game introduces new concepts and techniques to build a solid foundation for your own ideas and creativity. Beginning with the basics of drawing images to the screen, the book then incrementally introduces sprite animation, particles, sound effects, tile-based maps, and path finding. It then explores combining XNA with Windows Forms to build an interactive map editor, and builds a platform-style game using the editor-generated maps. Finally, the book covers the considerations necessary for deploying your games to the Xbox 360 platform.By the end of the book, you will have a solid foundation of game development concepts and techniques as well as working sample games to extend and innovate upon. You will have the knowledge necessary to create games that you can complete without an army of fellow game developers at your back.

Network Automation with Go. Learn how to automate network operations and build applications using the Go programming language

Nicolas Leiva, Michael Kashin

Go’s built-in first-class concurrency mechanisms make it an ideal choice for long-lived low-bandwidth I/O operations, which are typical requirements of network automation and network operations applications.This book provides a quick overview of Go and hands-on examples within it to help you become proficient with Go for network automation. It’s a practical guide that will teach you how to automate common network operations and build systems using Go.The first part takes you through a general overview, use cases, strengths, and inherent weaknesses of Go to prepare you for a deeper dive into network automation, which is heavily reliant on understanding this programming language. You’ll explore the common network automation areas and challenges, what language features you can use in each of those areas, and the common software tools and packages. To help deepen your understanding, you’ll also work through real-world network automation problems and apply hands-on solutions to them.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with Go and have a solid grasp on network automation.

Silverlight 4 User Interface Cookbook. Build and implement rich, standard-friendly user interfaces with Silverlight and Expression Blend

Vibor Cipan, Vibor Cipan (EUR)

Silverlight makes it much easier to build web applications with highly usable, interactive, and exciting user interfaces. However, with so many new options open to designers and developers, making the best use of the tools available is not always so easy. It's ease of use and rapid development process has left one area completely uncovered— how to design, build, and implement professional and usable interfaces, and create an enjoyable user experience and interaction.Written by a Microsoft MVP and Silverlight Prototyping Specialist, this book is the first and only book on developing Silverlight User Interfaces. Clear, step-by-step instructions show how to build all the user interface elements that users look forward to in a cutting edge app. This book offers essential recipes, with each recipe depicting the commonly used user interface patterns built with Silverlight, and in some cases, with WPF to showcase the possibilities.The author's experience in designing and developing user interfaces enables him to share insights on creating professional interfaces in a clear and friendly way. The book starts off with recipes dealing with fixed and fluid layouts, building custom command link controls, working with navigation, and collapsible panels, and then moves on to the more advanced topics such as calendars, alternating row colors, and task panes. The author covers a number of different UI patterns, controls, and approaches accompanied by XAML and C# code where needed (and explained), along with usage context and practical, proven, and professional techniques for specific controls and patterns.From maps to task panes, and web cam support to pixel shaders, this Cookbook provides you with a rich selection of Silverlight UI recipes. It covers all that you need to know in order to design and implement a user interface, together with professional user experience and interface guidelines to make your solutions and applications pleasurable for your users.The author has found himself in the role of both, a designer and a developer, at different points in his professional career, and his motive was to create a book that will serve as a useful resource for designers and developers trying to find their way with Silverlight and Expression Blend.By the end of the book, you will be able to create a rich, professional, and standards-compliant user interface.

Magento 2 Cookbook. Exploring Magento 2 in the form of recipes

Ray Bogman, Vladimir Kerkhoff

Magento 2 is an open source e-commerce platform that has all the functionality to function from small to large online stores. It is preferred by developers and merchants due to its new architecture, which makes it possible to extend the functionalities with plugins, a lot of which are now created by the community.This merchant and developer guide is packed with recipes that cover all aspects of Magento 2. The recipes start with simple how-to’s then delve into more advanced topics as the book progresses.We start with the basics of setting up a Magento 2 project on Apache or Nginx. Next, you will learn about basics including system tools and caching to get your Magento 2 system ready for the real work. We move on to simple tasks such as managing your store and catalog configuration. When you are familiar with this, we cover more complex features such as module and extension development. Then we will jump to the final part: advanced Magento 2 extensions. By the end of this book, you’ll be competent with all the development phases of Magento 2 and its most common elements.

MicroPython Cookbook. Over 110 practical recipes for programming embedded systems and microcontrollers with Python

Marwan Alsabbagh

MicroPython is an open source implementation of Python 3 that runs in embedded environments. With MicroPython, you can write clean and simple Python code to control hardware instead of using complex low-level languages such as C and C++. This book guides you through all the major applications of the MicroPython platform to build and program projects that use microcontrollers.This MicroPython book covers recipes that will help you experiment with the programming environment and hardware programmed in MicroPython. You'll find tips and techniques for building a variety of objects and prototypes that can sense and respond to touch, sound, position, heat, and light. This book will take you through the uses of MicroPython with a variety of popular input devices and sensors. You'll learn techniques to handle time delays and sensor readings, and apply advanced coding techniques to create complex projects. As you advance, you'll deal with Internet of Things (IoT) devices and integration with other online web services. In addition to this, you'll use MicroPython to make music with bananas and create portable multiplayer video games that incorporate sound and light animations into the gameplay.By the end of this book, you'll have mastered the tips and tricks to troubleshoot your development problems and take your MicroPython project to the next level.

Learning Continuous Integration with TeamCity. Master the principles and practices behind Continuous Integration by setting it up for different technology stacks using TeamCity

Manoj M Swaminathan

Rust Web Programming. A hands-on guide to developing, packaging, and deploying fully functional Rust web applications - Second Edition

Maxwell Flitton

Are safety and high performance a big concern for you while developing web applications?With this practical Rust book, you’ll discover how you can implement Rust on the web to achieve the desired performance and security as you learn techniques and tooling to build fully operational web apps.In this second edition, you’ll get hands-on with implementing emerging Rust web frameworks, including Actix, Rocket, and Hyper. It also features HTTPS configuration on AWS when deploying a web application and introduces you to Terraform for automating the building of web infrastructure on AWS. What’s more, this edition also covers advanced async topics. Built on the Tokio async runtime, this explores TCP and framing, implementing async systems with the actor framework, and queuing tasks on Redis to be consumed by a number of worker nodes. Finally, you’ll go over best practices for packaging Rust servers in distroless Rust Docker images with database drivers, so your servers are a total size of 50Mb each.By the end of this book, you’ll have confidence in your skills to build robust, functional, and scalable web applications from scratch.

Hadoop Essentials. Delve into the key concepts of Hadoop and get a thorough understanding of the Hadoop ecosystem

Zhijie Shen, Shiva Achari

Bootstrap for Rails. A quick-start guide to developing beautiful web applications with the Bootstrap toolkit and Rails framework

Syed F Rahman

Argo CD in Practice. The GitOps way of managing cloud-native applications

Liviu Costea, Spiros Economakis, Alexander Matyushentsev

GitOps follows the practices of infrastructure as code (IaC), allowing developers to use their day-to-day tools and practices such as source control and pull requests to manage apps. With this book, you’ll understand how to apply GitOps bootstrap clusters in a repeatable manner, build CD pipelines for cloud-native apps running on Kubernetes, and minimize the failure of deployments.You’ll start by installing Argo CD in a cluster, setting up user access using single sign-on, performing declarative configuration changes, and enabling observability and disaster recovery. Once you have a production-ready setup of Argo CD, you’ll explore how CD pipelines can be built using the pull method, how that increases security, and how the reconciliation process occurs when multi-cluster scenarios are involved. Next, you’ll go through the common troubleshooting scenarios, from installation to day-to-day operations, and learn how performance can be improved. Later, you’ll explore the tools that can be used to parse the YAML you write for deploying apps. You can then check if it is valid for new versions of Kubernetes, verify if it has any security or compliance misconfigurations, and that it follows the best practices for cloud-native apps running on Kubernetes.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build a real-world CD pipeline using Argo CD.

Learn SQL using MySQL in One Day and Learn It Well. SQL for beginners with Hands-on Project

Jamie Chan

Learn SQL (using MySQL) in One Day and Learn It Well is the ultimate guide for beginners aiming to grasp the complexities of SQL through hands-on learning. Starting with an introduction to the essence of databases, this book methodically advances through defining and manipulating tables, mastering data insertion, updates, deletions, and executing sophisticated data selection techniques across its comprehensive chapters. It further explores the creation and utility of views, the implementation of triggers to automate database responses, and the intricacies of variables, stored routines, control flow tools, and cursors, culminating in a capstone project that brings all concepts together.Culminating in a project , this book offers a unique opportunity to apply all the learned concepts in a practical, real-world scenario, reinforcing the skills and knowledge acquired throughout the chapters. The appendices provide additional resources including table definitions for practical exercises modeled on real-world scenarios.Embark on a learning journey that transitions you from novice to proficient in managing and querying databases with MySQL, empowering you with the skills to tackle real-world data challenges.

Instant PLC Programming with RSLogix 5000. Learn how to create PLC programs using RSLogix 5000 and the industry's best practices using simple, hands-on recipes

Austin Scott, Austin Scott

RSLogix5000 is a user friendly IEC61131-3-compliant interface for programming the current generation of Rockwell Automation PLCs, which includes Ladder Diagrams (LD), Graphical Function Block Diagrams (FBD), Graphical Structured Text (ST), and Sequential Function Charts (SFC).Instant PLC Programming with RSLogix 5000 captures the core elements of PLC programming with RSLogix 5000 with a minimal investment of time. We will avoid getting into control theory and focus on condensing the information specific to RSLogix 5000. We have selected the key areas of RSLogix and provide a step-by-step approach to teaching them.This book start by follows the steps involved in creating a new RSLogix 5000 project and configuring racks, slots, and channels. Next, we will create routines using the various languages available in RSLogix 5000, troubleshooting and resolving issues we encounter along the way. Finally, we will dive into the advanced features, such as online changes, code generation, task management, and user-defined structures.You will also learn object-oriented PLC programming techniques using advanced features like user-defined types (UDTs) that improve the maintainability, uniformity, and readability of our routines. We also highlight the strengths and limitations of online changes and demonstrate techniques to maximize flexibility.You will learn everything you need to get up and running with RSLogix 5000 as well as best practices used by industry experts.

Enhancing Virtual Reality Experiences with Unity 2022. Use Unity's latest features to level up your skills for VR games, apps, and other projects

Steven Antonio Christian, Patrick B. Thomas

Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as one of the most transformative mediums of the 21st century, finding applications in various industries, including gaming, entertainment, and education.Enhancing Virtual Reality Experiences with Unity 2022 takes you into the fascinating realm of VR, where creativity meets cutting-edge technology to bring tangible real-world applications to life. This immersive exploration not only equips you with the essential skills needed to craft captivating VR environments using Unity's powerful game engine but also offers a deeper understanding of the philosophy behind creating truly immersive experiences.Throughout the book, you’ll work with practical VR scene creation, interactive design, spatial audio, and C# programming and prepare to apply these skills to real-world projects spanning art galleries, interactive playgrounds, and beyond. To ensure your VR creations reach their full potential, the book also includes valuable tips on optimization, guaranteeing maximum immersion and impact for your VR adventures.By the end of this book, you’ll have a solid understanding of VR’s versatility and how you can leverage the Unity game engine to create groundbreaking projects.

Puppet 4 Essentials. Acquire skills to manage your IT infrastructure effectively with Puppet - Second Edition

Felix Frank, Martin Alfke

Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control over what you do to each Puppet Agent in a network, and when and how you do it. In this age of digital delivery and ubiquitous Internet presence, it's becoming increasingly important to implement scalable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software, but also the systems that run it. The free Ruby-based tool Puppet has established itself as the most successful solution to manage any IT infrastructure. Ranging from local development environments through complex data center setups to scalable cloud implementations, Puppet allows you to handle them all with a unified approach.Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition gets you started rapidly and intuitively as you’ll put Puppet’s tools to work right away. It will also highlight the changes associated with performance improvements as well as the new language features in Puppet 4. We’ll start with a quick introduction to Puppet to get you managing your IT systems quickly. You will then learn about the Puppet Agent that comes with an all-in-one (AIO) package and can run on multiple systems. Next, we’ll show you the Puppet Server for high-performance communication and passenger packages. As you progress through the book, the innovative structure and approach of Puppet will be explained with powerful use cases. The difficulties that are inherent to a complex and powerful tool will no longer be a problem for you as you discover Puppet's fascinating intricacies.By the end of the book, you will not only know how to use Puppet, but also its companion tools Facter and Hiera, and will be able to leverage the flexibility and expressive power implemented by their tool chain.

Raspberry Pi Robotics Essentials. Harness the power of Raspberry Pi with Six Degrees of Freedom (6DoF) to create an amazing walking robot

Richard Grimmett

OpenCV with Python Blueprints. Design and develop advanced computer vision projects using OpenCV with Python

Michael Beyeler