Mastering Reinforcement Learning with Python. Build next-generation, self-learning models using reinforcement learning techniques and best practices

Enes Bilgin

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a field of artificial intelligence (AI) used for creating self-learning autonomous agents. Building on a strong theoretical foundation, this book takes a practical approach and uses examples inspired by real-world industry problems to teach you about state-of-the-art RL.Starting with bandit problems, Markov decision processes, and dynamic programming, the book provides an in-depth review of the classical RL techniques, such as Monte Carlo methods and temporal-difference learning. After that, you will learn about deep Q-learning, policy gradient algorithms, actor-critic methods, model-based methods, and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Then, you'll be introduced to some of the key approaches behind the most successful RL implementations, such as domain randomization and curiosity-driven learning.As you advance, you’ll explore many novel algorithms with advanced implementations using modern Python libraries such as TensorFlow and Ray’s RLlib package. You’ll also find out how to implement RL in areas such as robotics, supply chain management, marketing, finance, smart cities, and cybersecurity while assessing the trade-offs between different approaches and avoiding common pitfalls.By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered how to train and deploy your own RL agents for solving RL problems.

Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies. Discover risk mitigation strategies for modern threats to your organization - Second Edition

Tim Rains, Timothy Youngblood CISSP

Tim Rains is Microsoft's former Global Chief Security Advisor and Amazon Web Services’ former Global Security Leader for Worldwide Public Sector. He has spent the last two decades advising private and public sector organizations all over the world on cybersecurity strategies.Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies, Second Edition builds upon the success of the first edition that has helped so many aspiring CISOs, and cybersecurity professionals understand and develop effective data-driven cybersecurity strategies for their organizations. In this edition, you’ll examine long-term trends in vulnerability disclosures and exploitation, regional differences in malware infections and the socio-economic factors that underpin them, and how ransomware evolved from an obscure threat to the most feared threat in cybersecurity. You’ll also gain valuable insights into the roles that governments play in cybersecurity, including their role as threat actors, and how to mitigate government access to data. The book concludes with a deep dive into modern approaches to cybersecurity using the cloud.By the end of this book, you will have a better understanding of the threat landscape, how to recognize good Cyber Threat Intelligence, and how to measure the effectiveness of your organization's cybersecurity strategy.

Hack the Cybersecurity Interview. Navigate Cybersecurity Interviews with Confidence, from Entry-level to Expert roles - Second Edition

Christophe Foulon, Ken Underhill, Tia Hopkins

The cybersecurity field is evolving rapidly, and so are the interviews for cybersecurity roles. Hack the Cybersecurity Interview, Second Edition, is the essential guide for anyone aiming to navigate this changing landscape.This edition, updated and expanded, addresses how to fi nd cybersecurity jobs in tough job markets and expands upon the original cybersecurity career paths. It offers invaluableinsights into various cybersecurity roles, such as cybersecurity engineer, penetration tester, cybersecurity product manager, and cybersecurity project manager, focusing on succeeding in interviews. This book stands outwith its real-world approach, expert insights, and practical tips. It's not just a preparation guide; it's your key to unlocking success in the highly competitive field of cybersecurity.By the end of this book, you will be able to answer behavioural and technical questions and effectively demonstrate your cybersecurity knowledge.

Instant Brainshark. Convert your boring, outdated slideshows into engaging and powerful audio presentations using BrainShark

Daniel Li

Brainshark's audio annotation system is a power presentation tool that allows you to convert your boring, outdated slideshows into engaging and powerful audio presentations. Alongside its mobile functionality and customer feedback capabilities, it provides an easy-to-use interface for anyone from account executives to sales directors.Instant Brainshark will quickly get you started with creating online presentations and web presentations following best practices. The book covers the basics of BrainShark and explores a variety of best practices in both Internet marketing and presentation design to help you build effective and powerful presentations.Instant Brainshark will start you off with the basic functionality of BrainShark in order to introduce you to the best practices involved in presentation design. Then, it will guide you through a series of important and useful recipes that will show you how to reach customers via various marketing channels.You will learn how to find customers through social media networks, whether they be on a desktop computer or mobile device, as well as how to get feedback from your valued customers. You will also dig into BrainShark's audio annotation system and learn how to get the most out of it by following the recommended guidelines. Lastly, the book will guide you through a recipe on how to upload your BrainShark audio presentations as videos on YouTube, furthering the exposure of your presentations.Using Instant Brainshark, you will learn everything you need to know, from starting your first presentation and applying audio annotations to sharing it across multiple social media websites and retrieving customer feedback.

Learning HBase. Learn the fundamentals of HBase administration and development with the help of real-time scenarios

Shashwat Shriparv

What's New in SQL Server 2012. Unleash the new features of SQL Server 2012 with this book and

Rachel Horder, Jon Reade, John Reade

Microsoft SQL Server has been part of the enterprise database landscape since SQL Server 7 arrived in 1998 and has evolved into the relational and BI platform of choice by businesses around the globe. The performance and full feature set of SQL Server has been widely recognized by the business community and it is viewed as a powerful weapon in their database and business intelligence arsenal. SQL Server brings numerous benefits to all businesses, central to which is a thorough understanding of the technology, both current and new.This is the book both DBAs and developers always wanted to buy but could never find in the bookstore. This is a SQL Server book that contains only the new features introduced in SQL Server 2012.This book will give you a competitive advantage by helping you to quickly learn and understand the new features of SQL Server 2012. Most readers will already have an established knowledge of SQL Server and will want to update their 2008/2008R2 knowledge swiftly with least pain.This book takes you through all of the new features of SQL Server 2012, from installing core database services and features, to the new administration and updated Transact-SQL functions. You will discover the new Analysis Services features, introduce data alerts and reporting features and explore the new enhancements to Integration Services. In addition you will learn how to automate, cleanse and transform critical business data with DQS and world-class enterprise level availability features.Finally, you will venture into simulating real-world database loads using Distributed Replay and complete your journey with a look at the new SQL Server cloud services and the new Hadoop big data platform.

Data Analytics Using Splunk 9.x. A practical guide to implementing Splunk’s features for performing data analysis at scale

Dr. Nadine Shillingford

Splunk 9 improves on the existing Splunk tool to include important features such as federated search, observability, performance improvements, and dashboarding. This book helps you to make the best use of the impressive and new features to prepare a Splunk installation that can be employed in the data analysis process.Starting with an introduction to the different Splunk components, such as indexers, search heads, and forwarders, this Splunk book takes you through the step-by-step installation and configuration instructions for basic Splunk components using Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances. You’ll import the BOTS v1 dataset into a search head and begin exploring data using the Splunk Search Processing Language (SPL), covering various types of Splunk commands, lookups, and macros. After that, you’ll create tables, charts, and dashboards using Splunk’s new Dashboard Studio, and then advance to work with clustering, container management, data models, federated search, bucket merging, and more.By the end of the book, you’ll not only have learned everything about the latest features of Splunk 9 but also have a solid understanding of the performance tuning techniques in the latest version.

Mastering Python Networking. Utilize Python packages and frameworks for network automation, monitoring, cloud, and management - Fourth Edition

Eric Chou

Networks in your infrastructure set the foundation for how your application can be deployed, maintained, and serviced. Python is the ideal language for network engineers to explore tools that were previously available to systems engineers and application developers. In Mastering Python Networking, Fourth edition, you'll embark on a Python-based journey to transition from a traditional network engineer to a network developer ready for the next generation of networks.This new edition is completely revised and updated to work with the latest Python features and DevOps frameworks. In addition to new chapters on introducing Docker containers and Python 3 Async IO for network engineers, each chapter is updated with the latest libraries with working examples to ensure compatibility and understanding of the concepts.Starting with a basic overview of Python, the book teaches you how it can interact with both legacy and API-enabled network devices. You will learn to leverage high-level Python packages and frameworks to perform network automation tasks, monitoring, management, and enhanced network security, followed by AWS and Azure cloud networking. You will use Git for code management, GitLab for continuous integration, and Python-based testing tools to verify your network.

Go Recipes for Developers. Top techniques and practical solutions for real-life Go programming problems

Burak Serdar

With its simple syntax and sensible conventions, Go has emerged as the language of choice for developers in network programming, web services, data processing, and other settings. This practical guide helps engineers leverage Go through up-to-date recipes that solve common problems in day-to-day programming. Drawing from three decades of distributed systems engineering and technical leadership at companies like Red Hat, Burak Serdar brings battle-tested expertise in building robust, scalable applications. He starts by covering basics of code structure, describing different approaches to organizing packages for different types of projects. You’ll discover practical solutions to engineering challenges in network programming, dealing with processes, databases, data processing pipelines, and testing. Each chapter provides working solutions and production-ready code snippets that you can seamlessly incorporate into your programs while working in sequential and concurrent settings. The solutions leverage the more recent additions to the Go language, such as generics and structured logging. Most of the examples are developed using the Go standard library without any third-party packages. By the end of this book, you’ll have worked through a collection of proven recipes that will equip you accelerate your Go development journey.

Learning AWS. Design, build, and deploy responsive applications using AWS cloud components

Aurobindo Sarkar, Amit Shah

Next-Level Instructional Design. Master the four competencies shared by professional instructional designers

Susan Nelson Spencer

The field of instructional design offers a rapidly growing, flexible, and rewarding career path. Chances are that if you’re a teacher creating training material, college professor designing educational courses, human resources professional creating learning content, or even a graphic designer curating content, you may already be engaging in instructional designing without even realizing it!This book teaches you all about the four capabilities that are most important to exceling as an instructional designer—teaching, writing, creating, and analyzing. The chapters are designed in a way that provides you with practical tips for day-to-day learning projects through true ID stories. You’ll get familiar with common misconceptions surrounding the field, along with how to overcome your shortcomings. With the help of easy-to-understand real-world case studies and practical tips, each chapter focuses on developing one particular competency to help you grasp the concepts with ease.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a comprehensive understanding of the key competencies needed to succeed in this field and their importance, and learned how to develop them effectively.

Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 Quickstart Cookbook. Get up to date with the exciting new features in .NET 4.5 Framework with these simple but incredibly effective recipes

Jose Luis Latorre, Jose Luis Latorre Millas

With about ten years since its first release, Microsoft's .NET Framework 4.5 is one of the most solid development technologies to create casual, business, or enterprise applications. It has evolved into a very stable framework and solid framework for developing applications, with a solid core, called the CLR (Common Language Runtime) Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 includes massive changes and enables modern application and UI development.Microsoft .Net Framework 4.5 Quickstart Cookbook aims to give you a run through the most exciting features of the latest version. You will experience all the flavors of .NET 4.5 hands on. The “How-to” recipes mix the right ingredients for a final taste of the most appetizing features and characteristics. The book is written in a way that enables you to dip in and out of the chapters.The book is full of practical code examples that are designed to clearly exemplify the different features and their applications in real-world development. All the chapters and recipes are progressive and based on the fresh features on .NET Framework 4.5.The book will begin by teaching you to build a modern UI application and improve it to make it Windows 8 Modern UI apps lifecycle model-compliant. You will create a portable library and throttle data source updating delays. Towards the end of the book, you will create you first Web API.

Synthetic Data for Machine Learning. Revolutionize your approach to machine learning with this comprehensive conceptual guide

Abdulrahman Kerim

The machine learning (ML) revolution has made our world unimaginable without its products and services. However, training ML models requires vast datasets, which entails a process plagued by high costs, errors, and privacy concerns associated with collecting and annotating real data. Synthetic data emerges as a promising solution to all these challenges.This book is designed to bridge theory and practice of using synthetic data, offering invaluable support for your ML journey. Synthetic Data for Machine Learning empowers you to tackle real data issues, enhance your ML models' performance, and gain a deep understanding of synthetic data generation. You’ll explore the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, gaining practical knowledge with hands-on examples of modern methods, including Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models. Additionally, you’ll uncover the secrets and best practices to harness the full potential of synthetic data.By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered synthetic data and positioned yourself as a market leader, ready for more advanced, cost-effective, and higher-quality data sources, setting you ahead of your peers in the next generation of ML.

AWS Observability Handbook. Monitor, trace, and alert your cloud applications with AWS’ myriad observability tools

Phani Kumar Lingamallu, Fabio Braga de Oliveira

As modern application architecture grows increasingly complex, identifying potential points of failure and measuring end user satisfaction, in addition to monitoring application availability, is key. This book helps you explore AWS observability tools that provide end-to-end visibility, enabling quick identification of performance bottlenecks in distributed applications.You’ll gain a holistic view of monitoring and observability on AWS, starting from observability basics using Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray to advanced ML-powered tools such as AWS DevOps Guru. As you progress, you'll learn about AWS-managed open source services such as AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) and AWS managed Prometheus, Grafana, and the ELK Stack. You’ll implement observability in EC2 instances, containers, Kubernetes, and serverless apps and grasp UX monitoring. With a fair mix of concepts and examples, this book helps you gain hands-on experience in implementing end-to-end AWS observability in your applications and navigating and troubleshooting performance issues with the help of use cases. You'll also learn best practices and guidelines, such as how observability relates to the Well-Architected Framework.By the end of this AWS book, you’ll be able to implement observability and monitoring in your apps using AWS’ native and managed open source tools in real-world scenarios.

Ext JS Data-driven Application Design. Learn how to build a user-friendly database in Ext JS using data from an existing database with this step-by-step tutorial. Takes you from first principles right through to implementation

Kazuhiro Kotsutsumi

Sencha Ext JS is an industry leader for business-standard web application development. Ext JS is a leading JavaScript framework that comes with a myriad of components, APIs, and extensive documentation that you can harness to build powerful and interactive applications. Using Ext JS, you can quickly develop rich desktop web applications that are compatible with all major browsers.This book will enable you to build databases using information from an existing database with Ext JS. It covers the MVC application architecture that enables development teams to work independently on one project. Additionally, the book teaches advanced charting capability, enabling developers to create state-of-the-art charts just once. These charts are compatible with major browsers without the need to rely on plugins.This hands-on, practical guide will take you through the mechanics of building an application. In this instance, we will use this application to manage existing data structures in the form of a database.You will begin by making SQL and tables in MySQL and will then move on to developing the project environment and introducing Sencha Cmd. You will learn to create a form to input data and monitor the state of the input, while seeing how Ext Direct will validate the form on the server side.Finally, you will have a working application that is ready for you to customize to suit your needs. You can also use it as a template for any future projects when you need a similar database.

Hands-On Unity 2022 Game Development. Learn to use the latest Unity 2022 features to create your first video game in the simplest way possible - Third Edition

Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo

Unity is a cross-platform game engine that provides you with powerful but simple-to-use features to solve the most common problems in Game Development, such as rendering, animation, physics, sound, and effects. You’ll learn to use these features to create simple but complete games (and all the nuances needed to handle Unity).Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this book will teach you to use the Unity game engine, create C# and visual scripts, integrate graphics, sound, and animations, and manipulate physics to create interesting mechanics for your game. You’ll then code a simple AI agent to challenge the user and work with profiling tools to ensure code efficiency.Finally, you'll work with Unity's AR tools to create AR experiences for 3D apps and games before publishing them to the world.If you are interested in creating impressive, commercial-quality games that are playable on a variety of platforms, then you’ve come to the right place.