Publisher: Packt Publishing
Founded in 2004 in Birmingham, UK, Packt's mission is to help the world put software to work in new ways, through the delivery of effective learning and information services to IT professionals. Working towards that vision, we have published over 6,500 books and videos so far, providing IT professionals with the actionable knowledge they need to get the job done - whether that's specific learning on an emerging technology or optimizing key skills in more established tools. As part of our mission, we have also awarded over $1,000,000 through our Open Source Project Royalty scheme, helping numerous projects become household names along the way.
513
Ebook

Network Vulnerability Assessment. Identify security loopholes in your network’s infrastructure

Sagar Rahalkar

The tech world has been taken over by digitization to a very large extent, and so it’s become extremely important for an organization to actively design security mechanisms for their network infrastructures. Analyzing vulnerabilities can be one of the best ways to secure your network infrastructure.Network Vulnerability Assessment starts with network security assessment concepts, workflows, and architectures. Then, you will use open source tools to perform both active and passive network scanning. As you make your way through the chapters, you will use these scanning results to analyze and design a threat model for network security. In the concluding chapters, you will dig deeper into concepts such as IP network analysis, Microsoft Services, and mail services. You will also get to grips with various security best practices, which will help you build your network security mechanism.By the end of this book, you will be in a position to build a security framework fit for an organization.

514
Ebook

AWS Networking Cookbook. Powerful recipes to overcome the pain points of optimizing your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Satyajit Das, Jhalak Modi

This book starts with practical recipes on the fundamentals of cloud networking and gradually moves on to configuring networks and implementing infrastructure automation. This book then supplies in-depth recipes on networking components like Network Interface, Internet Gateways, DNS, Elastic IP addresses, and VPN CloudHub. Later, this book also delves into designing, implementing, and optimizing static and dynamic routing architectures, multi-region solutions, and highly available connectivity for your enterprise. Finally, this book will teach you to troubleshoot your VPC's network, increasing your VPC's efficiency. By the end of this book, you will have advanced knowledge of AWS networking concepts and technologies and will have mastered implementing infrastructure automation and optimizing your VPC.

515
Ebook

Chef Cookbook. Achieve powerful IT infrastructure management and automation - Third Edition

Matthias Marschall

Chef is a configuration management tool that lets you automate your more cumbersome IT infrastructure processes and control a large network of computers (and virtual machines) from one master server. This book will help you solve everyday problems with your IT infrastructure with Chef. It will start with recipes that show you how to effectively manage your infrastructure and solve problems with users, applications, and automation. You will then come across a new testing framework, InSpec, to test any node in your infrastructure.Further on, you will learn to customize plugins and write cross-platform cookbooks depending on the platform. You will also install packages from a third-party repository and learn how to manage users and applications. Toward the end, you will build high-availability services and explore what Habitat is and how you can implement it.

516
Ebook

Natural Language Processing with Python Quick Start Guide. Going from a Python developer to an effective Natural Language Processing Engineer

Nirant Kasliwal

NLP in Python is among the most sought after skills among data scientists. With code and relevant case studies, this book will show how you can use industry-grade tools to implement NLP programs capable of learning from relevant data. We will explore many modern methods ranging from spaCy to word vectors that have reinvented NLP.The book takes you from the basics of NLP to building text processing applications. We start with an introduction to the basic vocabulary along with a work?ow for building NLP applications.We use industry-grade NLP tools for cleaning and pre-processing text, automatic question and answer generation using linguistics, text embedding, text classifier, and building a chatbot. With each project, you will learn a new concept of NLP. You will learn about entity recognition, part of speech tagging and dependency parsing for Q and A. We use text embedding for both clustering documents and making chatbots, and then build classifiers using scikit-learn.We conclude by deploying these models as REST APIs with Flask.By the end, you will be confident building NLP applications, and know exactly what to look for when approaching new challenges.

517
Ebook

Vue.js 2 and Bootstrap 4 Web Development. Build responsive SPAs with Bootstrap 4, Vue.js 2, and Firebase

Olga Filipova

In this book, we will build a full stack web application right from scratch up to its deployment.We will start by building a small introduction application and then proceed to the creation of a fully functional, dynamic responsive web application called ProFitOro. In this application, we will build a Pomodoro timer combined with office workouts. Besides the Pomodoro timer and ProFitOro workouts will enable authentication and collaborative content management. We will explore topics such as Vue reactive data binding, reusable components, routing, and Vuex store along with its state, actions, mutations, and getters. We will create Vue applications using both webpack and Nuxt.js templates while exploring cool hot Nuxt.js features such as code splitting and server-side rendering. We will use Jest to test this application, and we will even revive some trigonometry from our secondary school! While developing the app, you will go through the new grid system of Bootstrap 4 along with Vue.js’ directives. We will connect Vuex store to the Firebase real-time database, data storage, and authentication APIs and use this data later inside the application’s reactive components. Finally, we will quickly deploy our application using the Firebase hosting mechanism.

518
Ebook

Building Serverless Architectures. Unleash the power of AWS Lambdas for your applications

Cagatay Gurturk

Over the past years, all kind of companies from start-ups to giant enterprises started their move to public cloud providers in order to save their costs and reduce the operation effort needed to keep their shops open. Now it is even possible to craft a complex software system consisting of many independent micro-functions that will run only when they are needed without needing to maintain individual servers.The focus of this book is to design serverless architectures, and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, along with decision factors to consider. You will learn how to design a serverless application, get to know that key points of services that serverless applications are based on, and known issues and solutions.The book addresses key challenges such as how to slice out the core functionality of the software to be distributed in different cloud services and cloud functions. It covers basic and advanced usage of these services, testing and securing the serverless software, automating deployment, and more.By the end of the book, you will be equipped with knowledge of new tools and techniques to keep up with this evolution in the IT industry.

519
Ebook

Ripple Quick Start Guide. Get started with XRP and develop applications on Ripple's blockchain

Febin John James

This book starts by giving you an understanding of the basics of blockchain and the Ripple protocol. You will then get some hands-on experience of working with XRP.You will learn how to set up a Ripple wallet and see how seamlessly you can transfer money abroad. You will learn about different types of wallets through which you can store and transact XRP, along with the security precautions you need to take to keep your money safe.Since Ripple is currency agnostic, it can enable the transfer of value in USD, EUR, and any other currency. You can even transfer digital assets using Ripple. You will see how you can pay an international merchant with their own native currency and how Ripple can exchange it on the ?y. Once you understand the applications of Ripple, you will learn how to create a conditionally-held escrow using the Ripple API, and how to send and cash checks.Finally, you will also understand the common misconceptions people have about Ripple and discover the potential risks you must consider before making investment decisions.By the end of this book, you will have a solid foundation for working with Ripple's blockchain. Using it, you will be able to solve problems caused by traditional systems in your respective industry.

520
Ebook

Java Data Science Cookbook. Explore the power of MLlib, DL4j, Weka, and more

Rushdi Shams

If you are looking to build data sciencemodels that are good for production,Java has come to the rescue. With the aidof strong libraries such as MLlib, Weka,DL4j, and more, you can efficientlyperform all the data science tasks youneed to.This unique book provides modernrecipes to solve your common andnot-so-common data science-relatedproblems. We start with recipes to helpyou obtain, clean, index, and search data.Then you will learn a variety of techniquesto analyze, learn from, and retrieveinformation from data. You will alsounderstand how to handle big data, learndeeply from data, and visualize data.Finally, you will work through uniquerecipes that solve your problems whiletaking data science to production, writingdistributed data science applications,and much more - things that will come inhandy at work.

521
Ebook

Mastering OpenCV 3. Get hands-on with practical Computer Vision using OpenCV 3 - Second Edition

Shervin Emami, David Millán Escrivá, Daniel Lelis Baggio, Roy Shilkrot, ...

As we become more capable of handling data in every kind, we are becoming more reliant on visual input and what we can do with those self-driving cars, face recognition, and even augmented reality applications and games. This is all powered by Computer Vision.This book will put you straight to work in creating powerful and unique computer vision applications. Each chapter is structured around a central project and deep dives into an important aspect of OpenCV such as facial recognition, image target tracking, making augmented reality applications, the 3D visualization framework, and machine learning. You’ll learn how to make AI that can remember and use neural networks to help your applications learn.By the end of the book, you will have created various working prototypes with the projects in the book and will be well versed with the new features of OpenCV3.

522
Ebook

FreeSWITCH 1.8. Get to grips with VoIP and WebRTC communication and quickly build robust telephony systems with FreeSWITCH

Anthony Minessale II, Giovanni Maruzzelli

FreeSWITCH is an open source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat-driven products, scaling from a soft-phone to a PBX and even up to an enterprise-class soft-switch. This book introduces FreeSWITCH to IT professionals who want to build their own telephony system.This book starts with a brief introduction to the latest version of FreeSWITCH. We then move on to the fundamentals and the new features added in version 1.6, showing you how to set up a basic system so you can make and receive phone calls, make calls between extensions, and utilize basic PBX functionality.Once you have a basic system in place, we’ll show you how to add more and more functionalities to it. You’ll learn to deploy the features on the system using unique techniques and tips to make it work better.Also, there are changes in the security-related components, which will affect the content in the book, so we will make that intact with the latest version. There are new support libraries introduced, such as SQLite, OpenSS, and more, which will make FreeSWITCH more efficient and add more functions to it. We’ll cover these in the new edition to make it more appealing for you.

523
Ebook

Practical Site Reliability Engineering. Automate the process of designing, developing, and delivering highly reliable apps and services with SRE

Pethuru Raj Chelliah, Shreyash Naithani, Shailender Singh

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is being touted as the most competent paradigm in establishing and ensuring next-generation high-quality software solutions.This book starts by introducing you to the SRE paradigm and covers the need for highly reliable IT platforms and infrastructures. As you make your way through the next set of chapters, you will learn to develop microservices using Spring Boot and make use of RESTful frameworks. You will also learn about GitHub for deployment, containerization, and Docker containers. Practical Site Reliability Engineering teaches you to set up and sustain containerized cloud environments, and also covers architectural and design patterns and reliability implementation techniques such as reactive programming, and languages such as Ballerina and Rust. In the concluding chapters, you will get well-versed with service mesh solutions such as Istio and Linkerd, and understand service resilience test practices, API gateways, and edge/fog computing.By the end of this book, you will have gained experience on working with SRE concepts and be able to deliver highly reliable apps and services.

524
Ebook

Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming. Add powerful, believable, and fun AI entities in your game with the power of Unity 2018! - Fourth Edition

Dr. Davide Aversa, Aung Sithu Kyaw, Clifford Peters

Developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for game characters in Unity 2018 has never been easier. Unity provides game and app developers with a variety of tools to implement AI, from the basic techniques to cutting-edge machine learning-powered agents. Leveraging these tools via Unity's API or built-in features allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating your game's worlds and characters.This fourth edition with Unity will help you break down AI into simple concepts to give you a fundamental understanding of the topic to build upon. Using a variety of examples, the book then takes those concepts and walks you through actual implementations designed to highlight key concepts and features related to game AI in Unity.Further on, you'll learn how to distinguish the state machine pattern and implement one of your own. This is followed by learning how to implement a basic sensory system for your AI agent and coupling it with a Finite State Machine (FSM).Next, you'll learn how to use Unity's built-in NavMesh feature and implement your own A* pathfinding system. You'll then learn how to implement simple ?ocks and crowd dynamics, which are key AI concepts in Unity. Moving on, you'll learn how to implement a behavior tree through a game-focused example. Lastly, you'll apply all the concepts in the book to build a popular game.

525
Ebook

Learning PowerShell DSC. Automate deployment and configuration of your servers - Second Edition

James Pogran

The main goal of this book is to teach you to configure, deploy, and manage your system using the new features of PowerShell v5/v6 DSC.This book begins with the basics of PowerShell Desired State Configuration, covering its architecture and components. It familiarizes you with the set of Windows PowerShell language extensions and new Windows PowerShell commands that make up DSC. Then it helps you create DSC custom resources and work with DSC configurations with the help of practical examples. Finally, it describes how to deploy configuration data using PowerShell DSC. Throughout this book, we will be focusing on concepts such as building configurations with parameters, the local configuration manager, and testing and restoring configurations using PowerShell DSC.By the end of the book, you will be able to deploy a real-world application end-to-end and will be familiar enough with the powerful Desired State Configuration platform to achieve continuous delivery and efficiently and easily manage and deploy data for systems.

526
Ebook

Hands-On Design Patterns with Delphi. Build applications using idiomatic, extensible, and concurrent design patterns in Delphi

Primož Gabrijelčič

Design patterns have proven to be the go-to solution for many common programming scenarios. This book focuses on design patterns applied to the Delphi language. The book will provide you with insights into the language and its capabilities of a runtime library.You'll start by exploring a variety of design patterns and understanding them through real-world examples. This will entail a short explanation of the concept of design patterns and the original set of the 'Gang of Four' patterns, which will help you in structuring your designs efficiently. Next, you'll cover the most important 'anti-patterns' (essentially bad software development practices) to aid you in steering clear of problems during programming. You'll then learn about the eight most important patterns for each creational, structural, and behavioral type. After this, you'll be introduced to the concept of 'concurrency' patterns, which are design patterns specifically related to multithreading and parallel computation. These will enable you to develop and improve an interface between items and harmonize shared memories within threads. Toward the concluding chapters, you'll explore design patterns specific to program design and other categories of patterns that do not fall under the 'design' umbrella.By the end of this book, you'll be able to address common design problems encountered while developing applications and feel confident while building scalable projects.

527
Ebook

Apache Spark 2.x Cookbook. Over 70 cloud-ready recipes for distributed Big Data processing and analytics

Rishi Yadav

While Apache Spark 1.x gained a lot of traction and adoption in the early years, Spark 2.x delivers notable improvements in the areas of API, schema awareness, Performance, Structured Streaming, and simplifying building blocks to build better, faster, smarter, and more accessible big data applications. This book uncovers all these features in the form of structured recipes to analyze and mature large and complex sets of data.Starting with installing and configuring Apache Spark with various cluster managers, you will learn to set up development environments. Further on, you will be introduced to working with RDDs, DataFrames and Datasets to operate on schema aware data, and real-time streaming with various sources such as Twitter Stream and Apache Kafka. You will also work through recipes on machine learning, including supervised learning, unsupervised learning & recommendation engines in Spark.Last but not least, the final few chapters delve deeper into the concepts of graph processing using GraphX, securing your implementations, cluster optimization, and troubleshooting.

528
Ebook

Hands-On Machine Learning on Google Cloud Platform. Implementing smart and efficient analytics using Cloud ML Engine

Giuseppe Ciaburro, V Kishore Ayyadevara, Alexis Perrier

Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine combines the services of Google Cloud Platform with the power and flexibility of TensorFlow. With this book, you will not only learn to build and train different complexities of machine learning models at scale but also host them in the cloud to make predictions.This book is focused on making the most of the Google Machine Learning Platform for large datasets and complex problems. You will learn from scratch how to create powerful machine learning based applications for a wide variety of problems by leveraging different data services from the Google Cloud Platform. Applications include NLP, Speech to text, Reinforcement learning, Time series, recommender systems, image classification, video content inference and many other. We will implement a wide variety of deep learning use cases and also make extensive use of data related services comprising the Google Cloud Platform ecosystem such as Firebase, Storage APIs, Datalab and so forth. This will enable you to integrate Machine Learning and data processing features into your web and mobile applications.By the end of this book, you will know the main difficulties that you may encounter and get appropriate strategies to overcome these difficulties and build efficient systems.