PyTorch 1.x Reinforcement Learning Cookbook. Over 60 recipes to design, develop, and deploy self-learning AI models using Python

Yuxi (Hayden) Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a branch of machine learning that has gained popularity in recent times. It allows you to train AI models that learn from their own actions and optimize their behavior. PyTorch has also emerged as the preferred tool for training RL models because of its efficiency and ease of use.With this book, you'll explore the important RL concepts and the implementation of algorithms in PyTorch 1.x. The recipes in the book, along with real-world examples, will help you master various RL techniques, such as dynamic programming, Monte Carlo simulations, temporal difference, and Q-learning. You'll also gain insights into industry-specific applications of these techniques. Later chapters will guide you through solving problems such as the multi-armed bandit problem and the cartpole problem using the multi-armed bandit algorithm and function approximation. You'll also learn how to use Deep Q-Networks to complete Atari games, along with how to effectively implement policy gradients. Finally, you'll discover how RL techniques are applied to Blackjack, Gridworld environments, internet advertising, and the Flappy Bird game.By the end of this book, you'll have developed the skills you need to implement popular RL algorithms and use RL techniques to solve real-world problems.

Microsoft Power Platform Enterprise Architecture. Design tailor-made solutions for architects and decision makers to meet complex business requirements - Second Edition

Robert Rybaric

This book is for enterprise architects and decision makers who design solutions for complex business requirements. It teaches you how to use architectural best practices and methodologies to optimize an enterprise-grade solution.You'll gain an understanding of the tools available in the Power Platform suite and how to integrate them seamlessly with various Microsoft 365 and Azure components to create a tailor-made solution. Progressing through the book, you'll discover how to address application lifecycle management, security, extensibility, and data migration. This includes Power BI, which often requires a separate approach to the rest of the Power Platform.This book provides you with practical, essential, and concise information. It follows a complete, end-to-end example in every chapter, with diagrams that illustrate the intricacies of Microsoft cloud structure. It has been created by an experienced enterprise architect who actively creates solutions using Microsoft technology.By the end of this book, you'll have the strategic perspective of an enterprise architect to make accurate architectural decisions for your complex Power Platform projects.Unlike many other overwhelmingly long and unstructured resources, this book covers essential concepts using one concise yet practical example that is revisited throughout the book. You’ll develop the skills you need to architect, design, and manage a complex solution as you follow the journey of a fictitious enterprise customer as they enter the world of Power Platform. Throughout the book, you’ll discover how to combine the functionality of Microsoft Power PI, Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power Virtual Agents with various methodologies to effectively address application lifecycle management, security, and extensibility. You'll also learn how to overcome common challenges in migrating data to and from Microsoft Power Platform using proven techniques.By the end of this Microsoft book, you’ll have the strategic perspective of an enterprise architect, enabling you to make accurate architectural decisions for your complex Power Platform projects.

Moodle 4 Administration. An administrator's guide to configuring, securing, customizing, and extending Moodle - Fourth Edition

Alex Büchner

This updated fourth edition of the classic Moodle Administration guide has been written from the ground up and covers all the new Moodle features in great breadth and depth. The topics have also been augmented with professional diagrams, illustrations, and checklists.The book starts by covering basic tasks such as how to set up and configure Moodle and perform day-to-day administration activities. You’ll then progress to more advanced topics that show you how to customize and extend Moodle, manage authentication and enrolments, and work with roles and capabilities. Next, you'll learn how to configure pedagogical and technical Moodle plugins and ensure your LMS complies with data protection regulations. Then, you will learn how to tighten Moodle’s security, improve its performance, and configure backup and restore procedures. Finally, you'll gain insights on how to compile custom reports, configure learning analytics, enable mobile learning, integrate Moodle via web services, and support different types of multi-tenancy.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to set up an efficient, fully fledged, and secure Moodle system.

Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS. Develop future-proof responsive websites using the latest HTML5 and CSS techniques - Third Edition

Ben Frain

Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS, Third Edition is a renewed and extended version of one of the most comprehensive and bestselling books on the latest HTML5 and CSS tools and techniques for responsive web design.Written in the author's signature friendly and informal style, this edition covers all the newest developments and improvements in responsive web design including better user accessibility, variable fonts and font loading, CSS Scroll Snap, and much, much more. With a new chapter dedicated to CSS Grid, you will understand how it differs from the Flexbox layout mechanism and when you should use one over the other.Furthermore, you will acquire practical knowledge of SVG, writing accessible HTML markup, creating stunning aesthetics and effects with CSS, applying transitions, transformations, and animations, integrating media queries, and more. The book concludes by exploring some exclusive tips and approaches for front-end development from the author.By the end of this book, you will not only have a comprehensive understanding of responsive web design and what is possible with the latest HTML5 and CSS, but also the knowledge of how to best implement each technique.

Systems Engineering Demystified. A practitioner's handbook for developing complex systems using a model-based approach

Jon Holt

Systems engineering helps us to understand, specify, and develop complex systems, and is applied across a wide set of disciplines. As systems and their associated problems become increasingly complex in this evermore connected world, the need for more rigorous, demonstrable, and repeatable techniques also increases.Written by Professor Jon Holt – an internationally recognized systems engineering expert – this book provides a blend of technical and business aspects you need to understand in order to develop successful systems. You'll start with systems engineering basics and understand the complexity, communication, and different stakeholders' views of the system. The book then covers essential aspects of model-based systems engineering, systems, life cycles, and processes, along with techniques to develop systems. Moving on, you'll explore system models and visualization techniques, focusing on the SysML, and discover how solutions can be defined by developing effective system design, verification, and validation techniques. The book concludes by taking you through key management processes and systems engineering best practices and guidelines.By the end of this systems engineering book, you'll be able to confidently apply modern model-based systems engineering techniques to your own systems and projects.

The Chief AI Officer's Handbook. Master AI leadership with strategies to innovate, overcome challenges, and drive business growth

Jarrod Anderson, Jeff Winter

Chief Artificial Intelligence Officers (CAIOs) are now imperative for businesses, enabling organizations to achieve strategic goals and unlock transformative opportunities through the power of AI. By building intelligent systems, training models to drive impactful decisions, and creating innovative applications, they empower organizations to thrive in an AI-driven world. Written by Jarrod Anderson, Chief AI Officer at SYRV.AI, this book bridges the gap between visionary leadership and practical execution.This handbook reimagines AI leadership for today’s fast-paced environment, leveraging predictive, deterministic, generative, and agentic AI to address complex challenges and foster innovation. It provides CAIOs with the strategies to develop transformative AI initiatives, build and lead elite teams, and adopt AI responsibly while maintaining compliance. From shaping impactful solutions to achieving measurable business outcomes, this guide offers a roadmap for making AI your organization’s competitive edge.By the end of this book, you’ll have the knowledge and tools to excel as a Chief AI Officer, driving innovation, strategic growth, and lasting success for your organization.

Learning Jupyter. Select, Share, Interact and Integrate with Jupyter Not

Dan Toomey

Jupyter Notebook is a web-based environment that enables interactive computing in notebook documents. It allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and explanatory text. The Jupyter Notebook system is extensively used in domains such as data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, machine learning, and much more.This book starts with a detailed overview of the Jupyter Notebook system and its installation in different environments. Next we’ll help you will learn to integrate Jupyter system with different programming languages such as R, Python, JavaScript, and Julia and explore the various versions and packages that are compatible with the Notebook system. Moving ahead, you master interactive widgets, namespaces, and working with Jupyter in a multiuser mode.Towards the end, you will use Jupyter with a big data set and will apply all the functionalities learned throughout the book.

Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles. Create impressive production-ready projects using one of the most powerful rendering engines - Fourth Edition

Blender is one of the most versatile tools in the 3D software industry, and with a growing audience and constantly expanding set of features, it has become more powerful, useful, and in demand than ever before. This updated fourth edition of Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles is an all-inclusive guide to procedural texturing, rendering, and designing materials in Blender, covering all aspects of the 3D texturing workflow.The book begins by introducing you to Blender’s material nodes and material property functions, and then helps you create photorealistic textures by understanding texture maps and mapping them to 3D models. As you advance, you’ll learn to design high-quality environments and lighting using HDRIs and Blender’s lighting options. By exploring, breaking down, and studying the underlying mechanics that allow you to develop these elements, you’ll create any material, texture, or environment and use it to improve your artwork and present them in a professional way. Finally, you’ll discover how to correctly set up scenes and render settings, and get to grips with the key elements of achieving realism.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a solid understanding of materials, textures, shading, lighting, rendering, and all the critical aspects of achieving the highest quality with your 3D artwork.

IBM SmartCloud Essentials. This book provides an overview of what modern cloud computing involves, and then focuses specifically on the most important features of the IBM SmartCloud portfolio. A crash course in implementing cloud computing for your organization

Edwin Schouten

IBM, the oldest technology company in the world, has a wide variety of powerful cloud services to offer from its IBM SmartCloud portfolio. Being able to differentiate them, and knowing how to use them efficiently gives you a competitive advantage over others.Starting with the basics of cloud computing, this guide covers the wide range of cloud components, services, and solutions in the IBM SmartCloud portfolio. Following on from this, you'll be introduced to the public , Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud service - IBM SmartCloud Enterprise; before peeking into the future of IBM cloud services. Using this book, you will discover the advantage of both traditional enterprise computing and public cloud computing.You will explore IBM's portfolio of cloud computing solutions ranging from infrastructure services (IaaS), to business services (BPaaS), and private to public cloud. You will be taken through a number of in-depth use-cases, examples, and hand-on exercises that will help you to take advantage of infrastructure as a service solution IBM SmartCloud Enterprise quickly and easily.You will learn everything you need to know about the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, including how to take advantage of cloud computing within your organization.

Building Android Games with Cocos2d-x. Learn to create engaging and spectacular games for Android using Cocos2d-x

Raydelto Hernadez, Raydelto Hernandez

NumPy Cookbook. If you’re a Python developer with basic NumPy skills, the 70+ recipes in this brilliant cookbook will boost your skills in no time. Learn to raise productivity levels and code faster and cleaner with the open source mathematical library

Ivan Idris, NumPy

Today's world of science and technology is all about speed and flexibility. When it comes to scientific computing, NumPy is on the top of the list. NumPy will give you both speed and high productivity.NumPy Cookbook will teach you all about NumPy, a leading scientific computing library. NumPy replaces a lot of the functionality of Matlab and Mathematica, but in contrast to those products, it is free and open source.Numpy Cookbook will teach you to write readable, efficient, and fast code that is as close to the language of Mathematics as much as possible with the cutting edge open source NumPy software library.You will learn about installing and using NumPy and related concepts. At the end of the book, we will explore related scientific computing projects.This book will give you a solid foundation in NumPy arrays and universal functions. You will also learn about plotting with Matplotlib and the related SciPy project through examples.NumPy Cookbook will help you to be productive with NumPy and write clean and fast code.

Data Augmentation with Python. Enhance deep learning accuracy with data augmentation methods for image, text, audio, and tabular data

Duc Haba

Data is paramount in AI projects, especially for deep learning and generative AI, as forecasting accuracy relies on input datasets being robust. Acquiring additional data through traditional methods can be challenging, expensive, and impractical, and data augmentation offers an economical option to extend the dataset.The book teaches you over 20 geometric, photometric, and random erasing augmentation methods using seven real-world datasets for image classification and segmentation. You’ll also review eight image augmentation open source libraries, write object-oriented programming (OOP) wrapper functions in Python Notebooks, view color image augmentation effects, analyze safe levels and biases, as well as explore fun facts and take on fun challenges. As you advance, you’ll discover over 20 character and word techniques for text augmentation using two real-world datasets and excerpts from four classic books. The chapter on advanced text augmentation uses machine learning to extend the text dataset, such as Transformer, Word2vec, BERT, GPT-2, and others. While chapters on audio and tabular data have real-world data, open source libraries, amazing custom plots, and Python Notebook, along with fun facts and challenges.By the end of this book, you will be proficient in image, text, audio, and tabular data augmentation techniques.

Agile Technical Practices Distilled. A learning journey in technical practices and principles of software design

Pedro M. Santos, Marco Consolaro, Alessandro Di Gioia

The number of popular technical practices has grown exponentially in the last few years. Learning the common fundamental software development practices can help you become a better programmer. This book uses the term Agile as a wide umbrella and covers Agile principles and practices, as well as most methodologies associated with it. You’ll begin by discovering how driver-navigator, chess clock, and other techniques used in the pair programming approach introduce discipline while writing code. You’ll then learn to safely change the design of your code using refactoring. While learning these techniques, you’ll also explore various best practices to write efficient tests. The concluding chapters of the book delve deep into the SOLID principles - the five design principles that you can use to make your software more understandable, flexible and maintainable. By the end of the book, you will have discovered new ideas for improving your software design skills, the relationship within your team, and the way your business works.

Journey to Become a Google Cloud Machine Learning Engineer. Build the mind and hand of a Google Certified ML professional

Logan Song

This book aims to provide a study guide to learn and master machine learning in Google Cloud: to build a broad and strong knowledge base, train hands-on skills, and get certified as a Google Cloud Machine Learning Engineer.The book is for someone who has the basic Google Cloud Platform (GCP) knowledge and skills, and basic Python programming skills, and wants to learn machine learning in GCP to take their next step toward becoming a Google Cloud Certified Machine Learning professional.The book starts by laying the foundations of Google Cloud Platform and Python programming, followed the by building blocks of machine learning, then focusing on machine learning in Google Cloud, and finally ends the studying for the Google Cloud Machine Learning certification by integrating all the knowledge and skills together.The book is based on the graduate courses the author has been teaching at the University of Texas at Dallas. When going through the chapters, the reader is expected to study the concepts, complete the exercises, understand and practice the labs in the appendices, and study each exam question thoroughly. Then, at the end of the learning journey, you can expect to harvest the knowledge, skills, and a certificate.

Building Forms with Vue.js. Patterns for building and scaling complex forms with great UX

Marina Mosti

Almost every web application and site out there handles user input in one way or another, from registration forms and log-in handling to registration and landing pages. Building Forms with Vue.js follows a step-by-step approach to help you create an efficient user interface (UI) and seamless user experience (UX) by building quick and easy-to-use forms.You’ll get off to a steady start by setting up the demo project. Next, you’ll get to grips with component composition from creating reusable form components through to implementing the custom input components. To further help you develop a convenient user input experience, the book will show you how to enhance custom inputs with v-mask. As you progress, you’ll get up to speed with using Vuelidate and Vuex to effectively integrate your forms. You’ll learn how to create forms that use global state, reactive instant user input validation and input masking, along with ensuring that they are completely schema-driven and connected to your application’s API. Every chapter builds on the concepts learned in the previous chapter, while also allowing you to skip ahead to the topics you’re most interested in.By the end of this book, you will have gained the skills you need to transform even the simplest form into a crafted user and developer experience with Vue.

Web Content Management with Documentum. Setup, Design, Develop, and Deploy Documentum Applications

Gaurav Kathuria, BPB Publications

One of the world leaders in Enterprise Content Management, the EMC Documentum family of applications helps you manage all types of content across multiple departments within a single repository. With the Web Content Management suite of applications, you can efficiently manage content and underlying processes for your Web properties, and ensures that they are responsive to business needs.To fully realize the power of this system can seem daunting, but this book will help you achieve that. With easy to follow examples, this book will take you the simplest and most straightforward route to success. Along the way, you will learn insights that only a seasoned professional would know.Packed with practical examples, you will get hands-on with the powerful features of Documentum to grow your skills and confidence. You will see tips and tricks to handle complexities of the system, and avoid the common errors that waste your time.From installing and getting started with Documentum, you will see how to design and develop Documentum applications, before rounding off with deployment.