Data Modeling with Microsoft Excel. Model and analyze data using Power Pivot, DAX, and Cube functions

Bernard Obeng Boateng, Michael Olafusi

Microsoft Excel's BI solutions have evolved, offering users more flexibility and control over analyzing data directly in Excel. Features like PivotTables, Data Model, Power Query, and Power Pivot empower Excel users to efficiently get, transform, model, aggregate, and visualize data.Data Modeling with Microsoft Excel offers a practical way to demystify the use and application of these tools using real-world examples and simple illustrations.This book will introduce you to the world of data modeling in Excel, as well as definitions and best practices in data structuring for both normalized and denormalized data. The next set of chapters will take you through the useful features of Data Model and Power Pivot, helping you get to grips with the types of schemas (snowflake and star) and create relationships within multiple tables. You’ll also understand how to create powerful and flexible measures using DAX and Cube functions.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to apply the acquired knowledge in real-world scenarios and build an interactive dashboard that will help you make important decisions.

Unity Certified Programmer Exam Guide. Pass the Unity certification exam with the help of expert tips and techniques - Second Edition

Philip Walker

Unity Certified Programmer is a global certification program by Unity for anyone looking to become a professional Unity developer. The official Unity programmer exam will not only validate your Unity knowledge and skills, but will also enable you to be a part of the Unity community.This study guide will start by building on your understanding of C# programming and taking you through the process of downloading and installing Unity. You’ll understand how Unity works and get to grips with the Unity exam’s core objectives. As you advance, you’ll enhance your skills by creating an enjoyable side-scrolling shooter game that can be played within the Unity Editor or any modern Android mobile device. This Unity book will test your knowledge with self-assessment questions and help you take your skills to an advanced level by working with Unity tools such as the animator, particle effects, lighting, UI/UX, scriptable objects, and debugging.By the end of this book, you’ll have developed a solid understanding of the different tools in Unity and be able to create impressive Unity applications by making the most of its toolset.

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan. Develop a modern rendering engine from first principles to state-of-the-art techniques

Marco Castorina, Gabriel Sassone

Vulkan is now an established and flexible multi-platform graphics API. It has been adopted in many industries, including game development, medical imaging, movie productions, and media playback but learning it can be a daunting challenge due to its low-level, complex nature. Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan is designed to help you overcome this difficulty, providing a practical approach to learning one of the most advanced graphics APIs.In Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan, you’ll focus on building a high-performance rendering engine from the ground up. You’ll explore Vulkan’s advanced features, such as pipeline layouts, resource barriers, and GPU-driven rendering, to automate tedious tasks and create efficient workflows. Additionally, you'll delve into cutting-edge techniques like mesh shaders and real-time ray tracing, elevating your graphics programming to the next level.By the end of this book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of modern rendering engines to confidently handle large-scale projects. Whether you're developing games, simulations, or visual effects, this guide will equip you with the skills and knowledge to harness Vulkan’s full potential.

Nginx Troubleshooting. Investigate and solve problems with Nginx-powered websites using a deep understanding of the underlying principles

Alex Kapranoff, Rainer Duffner, Antonio Almeida, Alexey Kapranov

Nginx is clearly winning the race to be the dominant software to power modern websites. It is fast and open source, maintained with passion by a brilliant team. This book will help you maintain your Nginx instances in a healthy and predictable state.It will lead you through all the types of problems you might encounter as a web administrator, with a special focus on performance and migration from older software.You will learn how to write good configuration files and will get good insights into Nginx logs. It will provide you solutions to problems such as missing or broken functionality and also show you how to tackle performance issues with the Nginx server. A special chapter is devoted to the art of prevention, that is, monitoring and alerting services you may use to detect problems before they manifest themselves on a big scale. The books ends with a reference to error and warning messages Nginx could emit to help you during incident investigations.

Scala Data Analysis Cookbook. Navigate the world of data analysis, visualization, and machine learning with over 100 hands-on Scala recipes

Arun Manivannan

This book will introduce you to the most popular Scala tools, libraries, and frameworks through practical recipes around loading, manipulating, and preparing your data. It will also help you explore and make sense of your data using stunning and insightfulvisualizations, and machine learning toolkits.Starting with introductory recipes on utilizing the Breeze and Spark libraries, get to grips withhow to import data from a host of possible sources and how to pre-process numerical, string, and date data. Next, you’ll get an understanding of concepts that will help you visualize data using the Apache Zeppelin and Bokeh bindings in Scala, enabling exploratory data analysis. iscover how to program quintessential machine learning algorithms using Spark ML library. Work through steps to scale your machine learning models and deploy them into a standalone cluster, EC2, YARN, and Mesos. Finally dip into the powerful options presented by Spark Streaming, and machine learning for streaming data, as well as utilizing Spark GraphX.

Hands-On Exploratory Data Analysis with R. Become an expert in exploratory data analysis using R packages

Radhika Datar, Harish Garg

Hands-On Exploratory Data Analysis with R will help you build a strong foundation in data analysis and get well-versed with elementary ways to analyze data. You will learn how to understand your data and summarize its characteristics. You'll also study the structure of your data, and you'll explore graphical and numerical techniques using the R language.This book covers the entire exploratory data analysis (EDA) process—data collection, generating statistics, distribution, and invalidating the hypothesis. As you progress through the book, you will set up a data analysis environment with tools such as ggplot2, knitr, and R Markdown, using DOE Scatter Plot and SML2010 for multifactor, optimization, and regression data problems.By the end of this book, you will be able to successfully carry out a preliminary investigation on any dataset, uncover hidden insights, and present your results in a business context.

Data Engineering with Scala and Spark. Build streaming and batch pipelines that process massive amounts of data using Scala

Eric Tome, Rupam Bhattacharjee, David Radford

Most data engineers know that performance issues in a distributed computing environment can easily lead to issues impacting the overall efficiency and effectiveness of data engineering tasks. While Python remains a popular choice for data engineering due to its ease of use, Scala shines in scenarios where the performance of distributed data processing is paramount.This book will teach you how to leverage the Scala programming language on the Spark framework and use the latest cloud technologies to build continuous and triggered data pipelines. You’ll do this by setting up a data engineering environment for local development and scalable distributed cloud deployments using data engineering best practices, test-driven development, and CI/CD. You’ll also get to grips with DataFrame API, Dataset API, and Spark SQL API and its use. Data profiling and quality in Scala will also be covered, alongside techniques for orchestrating and performance tuning your end-to-end pipelines to deliver data to your end users. By the end of this book, you will be able to build streaming and batch data pipelines using Scala while following software engineering best practices.

LaTeX Cookbook. Over 100 practical, ready-to-use LaTeX recipes for instant solutions - Second Edition

Stefan Kottwitz

The second edition of LaTeX Cookbook offers improved and additional examples especially for users in science and academia, with a focus on new packages for creating graphics with LaTeX. This edition also features an additional chapter on ChatGPT use to improve content, streamline code, and automate tasks, thereby saving time. This book is a practical guide to utilizing the capabilities of modern document classes and exploring the functionalities of the newest LaTeX packages. Starting with familiar document types like articles, books, letters, posters, leaflets, and presentations, it contains detailed tutorials for refining text design, adjusting fonts, managing images, creating tables, and optimizing PDFs. It also covers elements such as the bibliography, glossary, and index. You’ll learn to create graphics directly within LaTeX, including diagrams and plots, and explore LaTeX’s application across various fields like mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computer science. The book’s website offers online compilable code, an example gallery, and supplementary information related to the book, including the author’s LaTeX forum, where you can get personal support. By the end of this book, you’ll have the skills to optimize productivity through practical demonstrations of effective LaTeX usage in diverse scenarios.

Oracle APEX Cookbook. Get straight into developing modern web applications, including mobile, using the recipes in this brilliant cookbook for Oracle Application Express (APEX). From the basics to more advanced features, it’s a reference book and guide in one

Michel van Zoest, Marcel van der Plas

Reimagining Characters with Unreal Engine's MetaHuman Creator. Elevate your films with cinema-quality character designs and motion capture animation

Brian Rossney, Ciaran Kavanagh

MetaHuman Creator (MHC) is an online, user-friendly 3D design tool for creating highly realistic digital humans that can be animated within Unreal Engine (UE) and enhanced with motion capture technology. This means that filmmakers and game developers now have access to a high quality, affordable solution that was previously only available to specialist studios.This book will focus on using UE5 and MHC from a filmmaker angle. Firstly, you’ll understand how to use the online MHC to create a digital character, changing its facial structure, body type, and clothing. After that, you’ll learn all the necessary steps to bring the character into UE5 and set it up for animation. Then, using an iPhone and a webcam to capture face and body movements, you’ll mix these motion capture files, refine the animations using the MetaHuman Control Rig, and save these takes to be reused and edited again within the Level Sequencer. On top of that, you’ll learn how to create a rendered video file for film production using both the Level Sequencer and a VR Cinematic Camera. By the end of this book, you’ll have created your own MetaHuman character, as well as face and body motion capture data, and learned the necessary skills to give your future projects further realism and creative control.

Kinect in Motion - Audio and Visual Tracking by Example. Start building for the Kinect today by capturing gestures, movements, and spoken voice commands

massimo fascinari, Clemente Giorio

Kinect is a motion-sensing input device by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game console and Windows PCs. It provides capabilities to enhance human-machine interaction along with a zero-to-hero journey to engage the user in a multimodal interface dialog with your software solution.Kinect in Motion - Audio and Visual Tracking by Example guides you in developing more than five models you can use to capture gestures, movements, and voice spoken commands. The examples and the theory discussed provide you with the knowledge to let the user become a part of your application.Kinect in Motion - Audio and Visual Tracking by Example is a compact reference on how to master color, depth, skeleton, and audio data streams handled by Kinect for Windows.Starting with an introduction to Kinect and its characteristics, you will first be shown how to master the color data stream with no more than one page of lines of code. Learn how to manage the depth information and map them against the color ones. You will then learn how to define and manage gestures that enable the user to instruct the application simply by moving arms or any other type of natural action. Finally you will complete your journey through a multimodal interface, combining gestures with audio.The book will lead you through many detailed, real-world examples, and even guide you on how to test your application.

Supervised Machine Learning with Python. Develop rich Python coding practices while exploring supervised machine learning

Taylor Smith

Supervised machine learning is used in a wide range of sectors, such as finance, online advertising, and analytics, to train systems to make pricing predictions, campaign adjustments, customer recommendations, and much more by learning from the data that is used to train it and making decisions on its own. This makes it crucial to know how a machine 'learns' under the hood.This book will guide you through the implementation and nuances of many popular supervised machine learning algorithms, and help you understand how they work. You’ll embark on this journey with a quick overview of supervised learning and see how it differs from unsupervised learning. You’ll then explore parametric models, such as linear and logistic regression, non-parametric methods, such as decision trees, and a variety of clustering techniques that facilitate decision-making and predictions. As you advance, you'll work hands-on with recommender systems, which are widely used by online companies to increase user interaction and enrich shopping potential. Finally, you’ll wrap up with a brief foray into neural networks and transfer learning.By the end of this book, you’ll be equipped with hands-on techniques and will have gained the practical know-how you need to quickly and effectively apply algorithms to solve new problems.

Dart Essentials. Design and build full-featured web and CLI apps using the powerful Dart language and its libraries and tools

Martin Sikora, Krunal Jhaveri

vCenter Troubleshooting. Resolve some of the most commonly faced vCenter problems with the use of this troubleshooting guide

Charles E Mills Jr, Chuck Mills

Mastering iOS 14 Programming. Build professional-grade iOS 14 applications with Swift 5.3 and Xcode 12.4 - Fourth Edition

Mario Eguiluz Alebicto, Chris Barker, Donny Wals

Mastering iOS 14 development isn’t a straightforward task, but this book can help you do just that. With the help of Swift 5.3, you’ll not only learn how to program for iOS 14 but also be able to write efficient, readable, and maintainable Swift code that reflects industry best practices.This updated fourth edition of the iOS 14 book will help you to build apps and get to grips with real-world app development flow. You’ll find detailed background information and practical examples that will help you get hands-on with using iOS 14's new features. The book also contains examples that highlight the language changes in Swift 5.3. As you advance through the chapters, you'll see how to apply Dark Mode to your app, understand lists and tables, and use animations effectively. You’ll then create your code using generics, protocols, and extensions and focus on using Core Data, before progressing to perform network calls and update your storage and UI with the help of sample projects. Toward the end, you'll make your apps smarter using machine learning, streamline the flow of your code with the Combine framework, and amaze users by using Vision framework and ARKit 4.0 features.By the end of this iOS development book, you’ll be able to build apps that harness advanced techniques and make the best use of iOS 14’s features.

XGBoost for Regression Predictive Modeling and Time Series Analysis. Learn how to build, evaluate, and deploy predictive models with expert guidance

Partha Pritam Deka, Joyce Weiner, Prof. Roberto V. Zicari

XGBoost offers a powerful solution for regression and time series analysis, enabling you to build accurate and efficient predictive models. In this book, the authors draw on their combined experience of 40+ years in the semiconductor industry to help you harness the full potential of XGBoost, from understanding its core concepts to implementing real-world applications.As you progress, you'll get to grips with the XGBoost algorithm, including its mathematical underpinnings and its advantages over other ensemble methods. You'll learn when to choose XGBoost over other predictive modeling techniques, and get hands-on guidance on implementing XGBoost using both the Python API and scikit-learn API. You'll also get to grips with essential techniques for time series data, including feature engineering, handling lag features, encoding techniques, and evaluating model performance. A unique aspect of this book is the chapter on model interpretability, where you'll use tools such as SHAP, LIME, ELI5, and Partial Dependence Plots (PDP) to understand your XGBoost models. Throughout the book, you’ll work through several hands-on exercises and real-world datasets.By the end of this book, you'll not only be building accurate models but will also be able to deploy and maintain them effectively, ensuring your solutions deliver real-world impact.