Mastering Adobe Photoshop 2024. Discover the smart way to polish your digital imagery skills by editing professional looking photos

Gary Bradley

Unlock the full potential of Photoshop, the go-to app for content creators, by mastering its complex tools and features. This book, drawing from the award-winning author’s 25+ years of design experience, builds on your existing Photoshop knowledge with proven industry techniques, serving as a launchpad to develop professional skills and transformative personal growth.You’ll fine-tune color and tone in your images with non-destructive adjustment layers and conceal content like backdrops with precise masking techniques for fine details like hair. Working through a series of real-world editing projects, crafting realistic brand mockups and traditional marketing collateral, you’ll learn robust methods for building social media assets in Photoshop, from images to animated GIFs and videos. You’ll also be able to bring your typography to life with styles and effects that are simple to edit and store as preset effects. The final section of the book encapsulates all of your learning to create complex montages using advanced masking and compositing techniques. You’ll have fun elevating your designs with surreal art styles and conceptual imagery using retouching, blending, and liquify filters.By the end of this Adobe Photoshop book, you’ll be equipped to create captivating visuals that leave a lasting impression on your audience.

TensorFlow 2 Reinforcement Learning Cookbook. Over 50 recipes to help you build, train, and deploy learning agents for real-world applications

Palanisamy P

With deep reinforcement learning, you can build intelligent agents, products, and services that can go beyond computer vision or perception to perform actions. TensorFlow 2.x is the latest major release of the most popular deep learning framework used to develop and train deep neural networks (DNNs). This book contains easy-to-follow recipes for leveraging TensorFlow 2.x to develop artificial intelligence applications.Starting with an introduction to the fundamentals of deep reinforcement learning and TensorFlow 2.x, the book covers OpenAI Gym, model-based RL, model-free RL, and how to develop basic agents. You'll discover how to implement advanced deep reinforcement learning algorithms such as actor-critic, deep deterministic policy gradients, deep-Q networks, proximal policy optimization, and deep recurrent Q-networks for training your RL agents. As you advance, you’ll explore the applications of reinforcement learning by building cryptocurrency trading agents, stock/share trading agents, and intelligent agents for automating task completion. Finally, you'll find out how to deploy deep reinforcement learning agents to the cloud and build cross-platform apps using TensorFlow 2.x.By the end of this TensorFlow book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of deep reinforcement learning algorithms and their implementations from scratch.

Joomla! 2.5 Beginner's Guide. Joomla! is the free and easy way to create websites, and this book is written for absolute beginners who want to learn the basics and go beyond. Packed with helpful screenshots and crystal clear instructions

Eric Tiggeler

Joomla! is one of the most popular open-source Content Management Systems, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. Although it's a fun and feature-rich tool, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build a site that meets your needs perfectly. Using this book you can create dynamic, interactive web- sites that perfectly fit your needs.Completely updated for Joomla! 2.5, this practical guide teaches you how to create professional, appealing and extendable websites, whether you want to create a full-featured company or club website or build a personal blog site.The Joomla! Beginner's Guide helps beginners to get started quickly and to get beyond the basics to take full advantage of Joomla!'s powerful features. Completely updated from the first book, real-life examples and tutorials will spark your imagination and show you what kind of professional, contemporary, feature-rich websites any developer can achieve with Joomla!. This book thoroughly covers the concepts behind the software and creates a coherent picture of how the software works. This book is not about what Joomla! can do ñ it's about what you can do using Joomla!.

Splunk 7 Essentials. Demystify machine data by leveraging datasets, building reports, and sharing powerful insights - Third Edition

J-P Contreras, Steven Koelpin, Erickson Delgado, Betsy Page Sigman

Splunk is a search, reporting, and analytics software platform for machine data, which has an ever-growing market adoption rate. More organizations than ever are adopting Splunk to make informed decisions in areas such as IT operations, information security, and the Internet of Things.The first two chapters of the book will get you started with a simple Splunkinstallation and set up of a sample machine data generator, called Eventgen.After this, you will learn to create various reports, dashboards, and alerts. You willalso explore Splunk's Pivot functionality to model data for business users. Youwill then have the opportunity to test-drive Splunk's powerful HTTP Event Collector. After covering the core Splunk functionality, you'll be provided with some real-world best practices for using Splunk, and information on how to build upon what you've learned in this book.Throughout the book, there will be additional comments and best practicerecommendations from a member of the SplunkTrust Community, calledTips from the Fez.

ETL with Azure Cookbook. Practical recipes for building modern ETL solutions to load and transform data from any source

Christian Cote, Matija Lah, Madina Saitakhmetova

ETL is one of the most common and tedious procedures for moving and processing data from one database to another. With the help of this book, you will be able to speed up the process by designing effective ETL solutions using the Azure services available for handling and transforming any data to suit your requirements.With this cookbook, you’ll become well versed in all the features of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) to perform data migration and ETL tasks that integrate with Azure. You’ll learn how to transform data in Azure and understand how legacy systems perform ETL on-premises using SSIS. Later chapters will get you up to speed with connecting and retrieving data from SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters, and even show you how to extend and customize the SSIS toolbox using custom-developed tasks and transforms. This ETL book also contains practical recipes for moving and transforming data with Azure services, such as Data Factory and Azure Databricks, and lets you explore various options for migrating SSIS packages to Azure. Toward the end, you’ll find out how to profile data in the cloud and automate service creation with Business Intelligence Markup Language (BIML).By the end of this book, you’ll have developed the skills you need to create and automate ETL solutions on-premises as well as in Azure.

Android Wearable Programming. Expand on your Android development capabilities by building applications for Android Wear

Steven F. Daniel

DevOps Unleashed with Git and GitHub. Automate, collaborate, and innovate to enhance your DevOps workflow and development experience

Yuki Hattori, Isabel Drost-Fromm

Git and GitHub are absolutely crucial for DevOps, playing a multifaceted role in streamlining the software development lifecycle and enabling smoother collaboration between development and operations teams.DevOps Unleashed with Git and GitHub enables you to harness the power of Git and GitHub to streamline workflows, drive collaboration, and fuel innovation. Authored by an expert from GitHub, the book starts by guiding you through Git fundamentals and delving into DevOps and the developer experience. As you progress, you’ll understand how to leverage GitHub's collaboration and automation features, and even use GitHub Copilot for enhanced productivity. You'll also learn how to bridge the DevOps gap, maintain code quality, and implement robust security measures. Additionally, hands-on exercises will equip you to elevate your developer experience, foster teamwork, and drive innovation at the speed of DevOps.By the end of this DevOps book, you’ll have mastered the Git fundamentals, conquered collaboration challenges, and unleashed the power of GitHub as you transform your DevOps workflows.

Gephi Cookbook. Over 90 hands-on recipes to master the art of network analysis and visualization with Gephi

Devangana Khokar, Devangana

Tomcat 6 Developer's Guide. Understanding how a servlet container actually works will add greatly to your Java EE web programming skills, and this comprehensive guide to Tomcat is the perfect starting point

Brian Fitzpatrick, Damodar Chetty

While Tomcat is one of the most popular servlet containers, its inner workings still remain a mystery to many developers. If you only have a superficial familiarity of how this container actually functions, much of its power remains untapped and underutilized. This book will provide you with all that you need to undertand how to effectively use Apache Tomcat. This book begins by providing detailed instructions on building a Tomcat distribution. The next few chapters introduce you to the conceptual underpinnings of web servers, the Java EE and servlet specifications, and the Tomcat container. Subsequent chapters address the key Tomcat components, taking care to provide you with the information needed to understand the internal workings of each component. Detailed examples let you walk through a Tomcat installation, stepping into key Tomcat components, as well as into your own custom servlets.During the course of the book you will encounter various structural components such as the Server and Service; containers such as the Engine, Host, Context, and Wrapper; and helpers such as the Loader, Manager, and Valve. You will also see how Tomcat implements the JNDI API to provide both a directory service for storage agnostic access to its resources, as well as a naming service that implements the Java EE Environment Naming Context.Along the way you will learn how various elements of the servlet 2.5 specification, as well as the HTTP RFCs are implemented by a servlet container. By the end of your journey, you will be able to count yourself as part of the elite minority of Java EE web developers who truly understand what goes on under the covers of a servlet container.

Nmap Essentials. Harness the power of Nmap, the most versatile network port scanner on the planet, to secure large scale networks

David Shaw

Advanced Deep Learning with R. Become an expert at designing, building, and improving advanced neural network models using R

Bharatendra Rai

Deep learning is a branch of machine learning based on a set of algorithms that attempt to model high-level abstractions in data. Advanced Deep Learning with R will help you understand popular deep learning architectures and their variants in R, along with providing real-life examples for them. This deep learning book starts by covering the essential deep learning techniques and concepts for prediction and classification. You will learn about neural networks, deep learning architectures, and the fundamentals for implementing deep learning with R. The book will also take you through using important deep learning libraries such as Keras-R and TensorFlow-R to implement deep learning algorithms within applications. You will get up to speed with artificial neural networks, recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, long short-term memory networks, and more using advanced examples. Later, you'll discover how to apply generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate new images; autoencoder neural networks for image dimension reduction, image de-noising and image correction and transfer learning to prepare, define, train, and model a deep neural network. By the end of this book, you will be ready to implement your knowledge and newly acquired skills for applying deep learning algorithms in R through real-world examples.

Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 Reporting. Create and manage business reports with Dynamics GP

Chris Liley, Christopher Liley, David Duncan

Resources such as the book you now hold in your hand are critical to taking the extra step in uncovering the trends locked deep within your data. Not only will this book offer insight into the many reporting tools currently available for GP, it will also offer a unique perspective on how each reporting tool can be used to meet specific challenges faced by your organization- Errol Schoenfish, a member of the Microsoft Dynamics community for over 24 yearsMicrosoft Dynamics GP 2010 is a sophisticated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system with a multitude of features and options. Microsoft Dynamics GP enables you to create and manage a variety of reports that help small and mid-size businesses effectively manage their financial and operational data.This book will show you how to create and manage reports, know what tools to use and when, how to use them and where to find the data based on how it's being entered into the system with Dynamics GP.This book will empower you with the tools and reports necessary to use Dynamics GP data in making key business decisions. The book addresses the many challenges and frustrations a company may face when preparing to build new reports. Then it moves on to explain how to find your data in the GP system and company databases. The book then dives deep into topics such as SmartLists, SL Builder and Excel Report Builder, Report Writer, SSRS Report Library, and Analysis Cubes Design and Management Reporter amongst others. With this knowledge in hand, you will be capable of selecting the most effective tool for the current reporting environment.

ArchiCAD 19 - The Definitive Guide. Dive into the wonderful world of Building Information Modeling (BIM) to become a productive ArchiCAD user

Adam R Rendek, Scott H MacKenzie

Building AI Applications with ChatGPT APIs. Master ChatGPT, Whisper, and DALL-E APIs by building ten innovative AI projects

Martin Yanev

Combining ChatGPT APIs with Python opens doors to building extraordinary AI applications. By leveraging these APIs, you can focus on the application logic and user experience, while ChatGPT’s robust NLP capabilities handle the intricacies of human-like text understanding and generation.This book is a guide for beginners to master the ChatGPT, Whisper, and DALL-E APIs by building ten innovative AI projects. These projects offer practical experience in integrating ChatGPT with frameworks and tools such as Flask, Django, Microsoft Office APIs, and PyQt.Throughout this book, you’ll get to grips with performing NLP tasks, building a ChatGPT clone, and creating an AI-driven code bug fixing SaaS application. You’ll also cover speech recognition, text-to-speech functionalities, language translation, and generation of email replies and PowerPoint presentations. This book teaches you how to fine-tune ChatGPT and generate AI art using DALL-E APIs, and then offers insights into selling your apps by integrating ChatGPT API with Stripe. With practical examples available on GitHub, the book gradually progresses from easy to advanced topics, cultivating the expertise required to develop, deploy, and monetize your own groundbreaking applications by harnessing the full potential of ChatGPT APIs.

CI/CD Design Patterns. Design and implement CI/CD using proven design patterns

Garima Bajpai, Michel Schildmeijer, Muktesh Mishra, Pawel Piwosz, ...

The fast-changing world of software development demands robust CI/CD solutions that go beyond traditional methods to address the complexities of modern pipelines. This practical guide presents proven design patterns to streamline your CI/CD processes, tackling pain points often overlooked by other resources. This book introduces continuous delivery design patterns to help practitioners and engineering teams design, adopt, and implement CI/CD. Drawing from decades of combined industry experience, the expert author team—including DevOps and cloud leader Garima Bajpai, industry expert Michel Schildmeijer, CI/CD framework creator Pawel Piwosz, and open source advocate Muktesh Mishra—provides invaluable insights from leading voices in the industry.The book lays a solid foundation by starting with the importance of CI/CD design patterns, components, and principles. You’ll learn strategies for scaling CI/CD with a focus on performance, security, measurements, and pipeline auditability, along with infrastructure and release automation. The book also covers advanced design patterns that integrate machine learning, generative AI, and near real-time CI/CD processes.By the end of this book, you’ll have a deep understanding of continuous delivery design patterns, a solid foundation for audits and controls, and be able to mitigate risks associated with the rapid integration of modern technology into the SDLC.

Tableau Prep Cookbook. Use Tableau Prep to clean, combine, and transform your data for analysis

Hendrik Kleine

Tableau Prep is a tool in the Tableau software suite, created specifically to develop data pipelines. This book will describe, in detail, a variety of scenarios that you can apply in your environment for developing, publishing, and maintaining complex Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) data pipelines.The book starts by showing you how to set up Tableau Prep Builder. You’ll learn how to obtain data from various data sources, including files, databases, and Tableau Extracts. Next, the book demonstrates how to perform data cleaning and data aggregation in Tableau Prep Builder. You’ll also gain an understanding of Tableau Prep Builder and how you can leverage it to create data pipelines that prepare your data for downstream analytics processes, including reporting and dashboard creation in Tableau. As part of a Tableau Prep flow, you’ll also explore how to use R and Python to implement data science components inside a data pipeline. In the final chapter, you’ll apply the knowledge you’ve gained to build two use cases from scratch, including a data flow for a retail store to prepare a robust dataset using multiple disparate sources and a data flow for a call center to perform ad hoc data analysis.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to create, run, and publish Tableau Prep flows and implement solutions to common problems in data pipelines.