Professional Cloud Architect Google Cloud Certification Guide. Build a solid foundation in Google Cloud Platform to achieve the most lucrative IT certification - Second Edition

Konrad Cłapa, Brian Gerrard, Yujun Liang

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the industry leaders thanks to its array of services that can be leveraged by organizations to bring the best out of their infrastructure. This book is a comprehensive guide for learning methods to effectively utilize GCP services and help you become acquainted with the topics required to pass Google's Professional Cloud Architect certification exam.Following the Professional Cloud Architect's official exam syllabus, you'll first be introduced to the GCP. The book then covers the core services that GCP offers, such as computing and storage, and takes you through effective methods of scaling and automating your cloud infrastructure. As you progress through the chapters, you'll get to grips with containers and services and discover best practices related to the design and process. This revised second edition features new topics such as Cloud Run, Anthos, Data Fusion, Composer, and Data Catalog.By the end of this book, you'll have gained the knowledge required to take and pass the Google Cloud Certification – Professional Cloud Architect exam and become an expert in GCP services.

Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere. Techniques to fuel business productivity and intelligent automation using RPA

Husan Mahey

With an increase in the number of organizations deploying RPA solutions, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is quickly becoming the most desired skill set for both developers starting their career and seasoned professionals. This book will show you how to use Automation Anywhere A2019, one of the leading platforms used widely for RPA.Starting with an introduction to RPA and Automation Anywhere, the book will guide you through the registration, installation, and configuration of the Bot agent and Control Room. With the help of easy-to-follow instructions, you’ll build your first bot and discover how you can automate tasks with Excel, Word, emails, XML, and PDF files. You’ll learn from practical examples based on real-world business scenarios, and gain insights into building more robust and resilient bots, executing external scripts such as VBScripts and Python, and adding error handling routines.By the end of this RPA book, you’ll have developed the skills required to install and configure an RPA platform confidently and have a solid understanding of how to build complex and robust, yet performant, bots.

Transformers for Natural Language Processing. Build, train, and fine-tune deep neural network architectures for NLP with Python, Hugging Face, and OpenAI's GPT-3, ChatGPT, and GPT-4 - Second Edition

Denis Rothman, Antonio Gulli

Transformers are...well...transforming the world of AI. There are many platforms and models out there, but which ones best suit your needs?Transformers for Natural Language Processing, 2nd Edition, guides you through the world of transformers, highlighting the strengths of different models and platforms, while teaching you the problem-solving skills you need to tackle model weaknesses.You'll use Hugging Face to pretrain a RoBERTa model from scratch, from building the dataset to defining the data collator to training the model.If you're looking to fine-tune a pretrained model, including GPT-3, then Transformers for Natural Language Processing, 2nd Edition, shows you how with step-by-step guides.The book investigates machine translations, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, question-answering, and many more NLP tasks. It provides techniques to solve hard language problems and may even help with fake news anxiety (read chapter 13 for more details).You'll see how cutting-edge platforms, such as OpenAI, have taken transformers beyond language into computer vision tasks and code creation using DALL-E 2, ChatGPT, and GPT-4.By the end of this book, you'll know how transformers work and how to implement them and resolve issues like an AI detective.

Game Development with Unity for .NET Developers. The ultimate guide to creating games with Unity and Microsoft Game Stack

Jiadong Chen, Ed Price

Understand what makes Unity the world’s most widely used real-time 3D development platform and explore its powerful features for creating 3D and 2D games, as well as the Unity game engine and the Microsoft Game Dev, including the Microsoft Azure Cloud and Microsoft Azure PlayFab services, to create games.You will start by getting acquainted with the Unity editor and the basic concepts of Unity script programming with C#. You'll then learn how to use C# code to work with Unity's built-in modules, such as UI, animation, physics, video, and audio, and understand how to develop a game with Unity and C#. As you progress through the chapters, you'll cover advanced topics such as the math involved in computer graphics and how to create a custom render pipeline in Unity with the new Scriptable Render Pipeline, all while optimizing performance in Unity. Along the way, you'll be introduced to Microsoft Game Dev, Azure services, and Azure PlayFab, and using the Unity3D PlayFab SDK to access the PlayFab API.By the end of this Unity book, you'll have become familiar with the Unity engine and be ready to develop your own games while also addressing the performance issues that you could encounter in the development process.

SFML Blueprints. Sharpen your game development skills and improve your C++ and SFML knowledge with five exciting projects

SFML, Maxime Barbier

Customizing and Extending SharePoint Online. Design tailor-made solutions with modern SharePoint features to meet your organization's unique needs

Matti Paukkonen

Explore the robust functionalities of SharePoint that ensure your business processes remain flexible and scalable. With its custom development features, SharePoint presents abundant opportunities to meet evolving needs, deliver personalized experiences, and seamlessly integrate across platforms. If you’re looking for practical guidance on developing custom SharePoint solutions, Customizing and Extending SharePoint Online is your essential companion.This book takes you through the different techniques for customizing SharePoint, harnessing its native capabilities, and extending them across other platforms. You’ll begin by organizing content with SharePoint sites and learning best practices for permission governance before learning how to create and manage pages and use web parts to create, aggregate, and format content. This SharePoint book also covers specialized use cases of the Viva Suite and delves into SharePoint automation with Power Automate while extending solutions with Power Apps. Toward the end, you’ll get to grips with designing personalized solutions with SharePoint Framework and Microsoft Graph.By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to deliver highly customized SharePoint solutions that align with your business objectives.

The Aspiring CIO and CISO. A career guide to developing leadership skills, knowledge, experience, and behavior

David J. Gee, Darryl West

Explore the intricacies of CIO and CISO roles with The Aspiring CIO and CISO by David Gee. This book leverages Gee's 20+ years of digital and cyber leadership experience, providing real-world insights, making it a valuable resource for those navigating the evolving landscape of the C-suite.Tailored to entry-level, mid-level, and senior managers looking to advance to the C-suite, this book serves a unique purpose in the realm of career guidance. The narrative speaks directly to individuals uncertain about their readiness for CIO or CISO roles, offering a personal mentorship experience that goes beyond technicalities. Armed with insights into crafting a powerful 90-day plan, you'll be well-equipped to catapult into CIO or CISO roles successfully. Beyond technical proficiency, the book instills survival skills, ensuring longevity and helping you prevent burnout in these pivotal positions. Additionally, by mastering the art of brand development and soft skills, you'll grasp the interpersonal dynamics crucial for executive leadership. This book is an indispensable guide for ambitious professionals, offering foresight and empowerment to thrive in the digital age.By the end of this book, you'll emerge with strategic dexterity, confidently steering your career trajectory towards the C-suite.

Drupal 7 Media. Integrate, implement, and extend rich media resources such as images, videos, and audio on your Drupal 7 website with this book and ebook - Third Edition

Liran Tal

Integrating images, video, and audio content on a Drupal site requires knowledge of appropriate community modules, and an understanding of how to configure and connect them properly. With the power of up-to-date technologies such as HTML5, responsive web design, and the best modules available in Drupal's eco-system, we can create the best Drupal 7 media website.Drupal 7 Media is a practical, hands-on guide that will introduce you to the basic structure of a Drupal site and guide you through the integration of images, videos, and audio content. Learn to leverage the most suitable community modules and up-to-date technology such as HTML5 to offer a great user experience through rich media content.The book begins with a practical introduction to the basic Drupal building blocks. It then breaks down each media resource, and explores them in detail.You will learn how to leverage Drupal's community modules to implement support for images, videos, and audio content, along with the best practices for implementation. We will be mentioning ideas throughout the book, which you can extend upon and use to build your own web applications. We will explore HTML5 support for media resources, the semantic web, and responsive web design, which are key topics in modern web application development. We will then build upon this knowledge and add more functionality to our sample website, such as support for analytic charts and customizing images, all of which we will implement using our own custom modules.You will learn everything you need to know about building, extending, and configuring a Drupal 7 media web application.

Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM. Find out how to improve business processes with jBPM, and discover how you can begin making a transformative impact as a business analyst in your organization

Matt Cumberlidge, Tom Baeyens

JBoss jBPM is a free, open-source, business process management solution. It enables users to create business processes that coordinate people, applications, and services.A business process is a sequence of activities triggered by a certain input that results in a valuable output. Business Process Management is about analyzing those activities in a structured way and eventually supporting their execution with a workflow application. This allows for the following results:Better management visibility of their business: improved decision makingLow cost of inputs: de-skilled labor requirements, less waste, standardized componentsBetter outputs: consistent quality, more customer satisfactionBusinesses have always tried to manage their processes, but software such as jBPM brings the methodology and management theory to practical life.JBoss jBPM offers the following key features:Graphical process definitionFlexibility to integrate code into the graphical process definitionA customizable web-based workflow application that runs the process you’ve definedEasy programming model to extend the graphical process definitionA process-oriented programming model (jPDL) that blends the best of process definition languages and Java.Easy to integrate with other systems through the JBoss middleware suite.

PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner's Guide. Combine the power of PHP and MongoDB to build dynamic web 2.0 applications

Rahbirul Islam Rubayeet Rubayeet, Rubayeet Islam, MongoDB

With the rise of Web 2.0, the need for a highly scalable database, capable of storing diverse user-generated content is increasing. MongoDB, an open-source, non-relational database has stepped up to meet this demand and is being used in some of the most popular websites in the world. MongoDB is one of the NoSQL databases which is gaining popularity for developing PHP Web 2.0 applications.PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner’s Guide is a fast-paced, hands-on guide to get started with web application development using PHP and MongoDB. The book follows a “Code first, explain later” approach, using practical examples in PHP to demonstrate unique features of MongoDB. It does not overwhelm you with information (or starve you of it), but gives you enough to get a solid practical grasp on the concepts.The book starts by introducing the underlying concepts of MongoDB. Each chapter contains practical examples in PHP that teache specific features of the database.The book teaches you to build a blogging application, handle user sessions and authentication, and perform aggregation with MapReduce. You will learn unique MongoDB features and solve interesting problems like real-time analytics, location-aware web apps etc. You will be guided to use MongoDB alongside MySQL to build a diverse data back-end.With its concise coverage of concepts and numerous practical examples, PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner’s Guide is the right choice for the PHP developer to get started with learning MongoDB.

Metasploit Revealed: Secrets of the Expert Pentester. Build your defense against complex attacks

Sagar Rahalkar, Nipun Jaswal

Metasploit is a popular penetration testing framework that has one of the largest exploit databases around. This book will show you exactly how to prepare yourself against the attacks you will face every day by simulating real-world possibilities.This learning path will begin by introducing you to Metasploit and its functionalities. You will learn how to set up and configure Metasploit on various platforms to create a virtual test environment. You will also get your hands on various tools and components and get hands-on experience with carrying out client-side attacks. In the next part of this learning path, you’ll develop the ability to perform testing on various services such as SCADA, databases, IoT, mobile, tablets, and many more services. After this training, we jump into real-world sophisticated scenarios where performing penetration tests are a challenge. With real-life case studies, we take you on a journey through client-side attacks using Metasploit and various scripts built on the Metasploit framework. The final instalment of your learning journey will be covered through a bootcamp approach. You will be able to bring together the learning together and speed up and integrate Metasploit with leading industry tools for penetration testing. You’ll finish by working on challenges based on user’s preparation and work towards solving the challenge. The course provides you with highly practical content explaining Metasploit from the following Packt books:1. Metasploit for Beginners 2. Mastering Metasploit, Second Edition3. Metasploit Bootcamp

Python Machine Learning. Learn how to build powerful Python machine learning algorithms to generate useful data insights with this data analysis tutorial

Sebastian Raschka

Machine learning and predictive analytics are transforming the way businesses and other organizations operate. Being able to understand trends and patterns in complex data is critical to success, becoming one of the key strategies for unlocking growth in a challenging contemporary marketplace. Python can help you deliver key insights into your data – its unique capabilities as a language let you build sophisticated algorithms and statistical models that can reveal new perspectives and answer key questions that are vital for success.Python Machine Learning gives you access to the world of predictive analytics and demonstrates why Python is one of the world’s leading data science languages. If you want to ask better questions of data, or need to improve and extend the capabilities of your machine learning systems, this practical data science book is invaluable. Covering a wide range of powerful Python libraries, including scikit-learn, Theano, and Keras, and featuring guidance and tips on everything from sentiment analysis to neural networks, you’ll soon be able to answer some of the most important questions facing you and your organization.

Instant RESS Implementation How-to. Take your responsive websites to the next level with server-side components

Chip Lambert

The web design industry has changed dramatically in the last year. Everything that was common practice before is now outdated and everyone is clambering to keep up. Get ahead of the curve with the future of responsive web design, RESS. Responsive Web design with Server Side components gives you the best of both worlds. Instant RESS Implementation How-to is an introduction to using server-side languages such as PHP to build a website that can easily adapt to whatever device the user visits your site with. You will no longer need a specific mobile site. RESS means saying goodbye to .m and .mobi forever.Instant RESS Implementation How-to will teach you everything you need to get started with RESS and start on the journey to becoming a better web developer. It looks at a new way to build mobile websites that can still have the look and functionality of a normal website.You will learn how to use PHP along with Modernizr and WURFL to build dynamic websites that deliver different content dependent on the devices being used.If you want a website that is truly ahead of the curve, then this is the book for you.

Reporting with Microsoft SQL Server 2012. Learn to quickly create reports in SSRS and Power View as well as understand the best use of each reporting tool

James Serra, William Anton

In-Memory Analytics with Apache Arrow. Perform fast and efficient data analytics on both flat and hierarchical structured data

Matthew Topol, Wes McKinney

Apache Arrow is designed to accelerate analytics and allow the exchange of data across big data systems easily.In-Memory Analytics with Apache Arrow begins with a quick overview of the Apache Arrow format, before moving on to helping you to understand Arrow’s versatility and benefits as you walk through a variety of real-world use cases. You'll cover key tasks such as enhancing data science workflows with Arrow, using Arrow and Apache Parquet with Apache Spark and Jupyter for better performance and hassle-free data translation, as well as working with Perspective, an open source interactive graphical and tabular analysis tool for browsers. As you advance, you'll explore the different data interchange and storage formats and become well-versed with the relationships between Arrow, Parquet, Feather, Protobuf, Flatbuffers, JSON, and CSV. In addition to understanding the basic structure of the Arrow Flight and Flight SQL protocols, you'll learn about Dremio’s usage of Apache Arrow to enhance SQL analytics and discover how Arrow can be used in web-based browser apps. Finally, you'll get to grips with the upcoming features of Arrow to help you stay ahead of the curve.By the end of this book, you will have all the building blocks to create useful, efficient, and powerful analytical services and utilities with Apache Arrow.

Learning Tableau 2022. Create effective data visualizations, build interactive visual analytics, and improve your data storytelling capabilities - Fifth Edition

Joshua N. Milligan, Blair Hutchinson, Mark Tossell, Roberto Andreoli

Learning Tableau 2022 helps you get started with Tableau and data visualization, but it does more than just cover the basic principles. It helps you understand how to analyze and communicate data visually, and articulate data stories using advanced features.This new edition is updated with Tableau’s latest features, such as dashboard extensions, Explain Data, and integration with CRM Analytics (Einstein Analytics), which will help you harness the full potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive modeling in Tableau.After an exploration of the core principles, this audiobook will teach you how to use table and level of detail calculations to extend and alter default visualizations, build interactive dashboards, and master the art of telling stories with data.You’ll learn about visual statistical analytics and create different types of static and animated visualizations and dashboards for rich user experiences. We then move on to interlinking different data sources with Tableau’s Data Model capabilities, along with maps and geospatial visualization. You will further use Tableau Prep Builder’s ability to efficiently clean and structure data.By the end of this audiobook, you will be proficient in implementing the powerful features of Tableau 2022 to improve the business intelligence insights you can extract from your data.