Android Game Programming by Example. Harness the power of the Android SDK by building three immersive and captivating games

John Horton

Liferay Beginner's Guide. Quick and easy techniques to build, deploy, and maintain your own Liferay portal with this book and

Caris Chan, Gaurav Barot, Mahipalsinh Rana, Samir Bhatt, ...

Moodle Course Design Best Practices. Design and develop outstanding Moodle learning experiences - Second Edition

Susan Smith Nash

Moodle is a leading virtual learning environment for your online course. This book incorporates the principles of instructional design, showing you how to apply them to your Moodle courses. With this guidance, you will develop and deploy better courses, content, and assessments than ever.This book will guide you as you learn how to build and incorporate many different types of course materials and dynamic activities. You will learn how to improve the structure and presentation of resources, activities, and assessments. All this will help you to create better for self-led courses, instructor-led courses, and courses for collaborative groups. The use of multimedia features to enhance your Moodle courses is also explained in this book.Our goal is to encourage creativity, and the free MoodleCloud hosting option is an ideal place for teachers, students, trainers, and administrators to jump in and play with all the new features, which include powerful new plug-ins, new resources, and activities.Moodle can be your sandbox as well as your castle of learning! With this book, you will build learning experiences that will last your learners’ lifetimes.

PLCs for Beginners. An introductory guide to building robust PLC programs with Structured Text

M. T. White

With the rise of smart factories and advanced technology, the demand for PLC programmers with expertise beyond ladder logic is surging. Written by M.T. White, a seasoned DevOps engineer and adjunct CIS instructor, this guide offers insights from the author’s extensive experience in PLC and HMI programming across industries. This book introduces a fresh approach to PLC programming, preparing you for future automation challenges through computer science and text-based programming.Starting with the basic components of PLCs and their integration with other modules, this book gives you a clear understanding of system functionality and helps you master PLC program execution by learning about flow and essential components for effective programming. You'll understand program design with pseudocode and flowcharts, vital for planning programs, and cover Boolean logic intricacies, harnessing logical functions and truth tables for precise control statements. The book gives you a comprehensive grasp of Structured Text, its syntax and features crucial for efficient programming. The book also focuses on advanced topics like cybersecurity in PLC systems and leveraging generative AI (GenAI), such as ChatGPT, to enhance productivity.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to design real-world projects using pseudocode and flowcharts, and implement those designs in Structured Text.

GitHub Essentials. Unleash the power of collaborative development workflows using GitHub - Second Edition

Achilleas Pipinellis

Whether you are an experienced developer or a novice, learning to work with Version Control Systems is a must in the software development world. Git is the most popular tool for that purpose, and GitHub was built around it, leveraging its powers by bringing it to the web.Starting with the basics of creating a repository, you will then learn how to manage the issue tracker, the place where discussions about your project take place. Continuing our journey, we will explore how to use the wiki and write rich documentation that will accompany your project. You will also master organization/team management and some of the features that made GitHub so well known, including pull requests. Next, we will focus on creating simple web pages hosted on GitHub and lastly, we will explore the settings that are configurable for a user and a repository.

Graph Machine Learning. Take graph data to the next level by applying machine learning techniques and algorithms

Claudio Stamile, Aldo Marzullo, Enrico Deusebio

Graph Machine Learning will introduce you to a set of tools used for processing network data and leveraging the power of the relation between entities that can be used for predictive, modeling, and analytics tasks. The first chapters will introduce you to graph theory and graph machine learning, as well as the scope of their potential use. You’ll then learn all you need to know about the main machine learning models for graph representation learning: their purpose, how they work, and how they can be implemented in a wide range of supervised and unsupervised learning applications. You'll build a complete machine learning pipeline, including data processing, model training, and prediction in order to exploit the full potential of graph data. After covering the basics, you’ll be taken through real-world scenarios such as extracting data from social networks, text analytics, and natural language processing (NLP) using graphs and financial transaction systems on graphs. You’ll also learn how to build and scale out data-driven applications for graph analytics to store, query, and process network information, and explore the latest trends on graphs. By the end of this machine learning book, you will have learned essential concepts of graph theory and all the algorithms and techniques used to build successful machine learning applications.

Mastering Adobe Photoshop Elements. Excel in digital photography and image editing for print and web using Photoshop Elements 2019

Robin Nichols

Adobe Photoshop Elements is a raster graphics editor for entry-level photographers, image editors, and hobbyists. Though it shares many of Photoshop CC's high-end features, it also boasts a significant number of simple to use, yet highly effective tools not found at the professional level.This book presents the complexities of image editing in easy-to-follow, bite-sized chunks, allowing you to quickly recognize the editing challenge, and helps you to identify the tools and techniques required to make improvements, and to apply those techniques quickly and efficiently. You will start by learning how to import, organize, manage, edit, and use your pictures in a format that's designed for creative photography projects. Going further, you'll discover how to fix a wide range of photographic problems based on the book's extensive repertoire of commonly applied solutions. You'll be escorted through a wide range of common processes that include applying artistic effects to creative projects, custom image makeovers, processing images for social media, and other file export methods.Towards the end of the book, you will understand what the most important tools and features actually do in Photoshop Elements, answering the often-asked question; What, when, and where would you use these features in a precise and practical way.

Hands-On Unity 2020 Game Development. Build, customize, and optimize professional games using Unity 2020 and C#

Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo

Over the years, the Unity game engine has extended its scope from just being about creating video games to building AR/VR experiences, complex simulations, real-time realistic rendering, films, and serious games for training and education. Its features for implementing gameplay, graphics, and customization using C# programming make Unity a comprehensive platform for developing professional-level, rich experiences.With this book, you'll be able to build impressive Unity projects in a step-by-step manner and apply your knowledge of Unity concepts to create a real-world game. Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide will show you how to develop your first complete game using a variety of Unity tools. As you make progress, you'll learn how to make the most of the Unity Editor and create scripts using the C# programming language. This Unity game development book will then take you through integrating graphics, sound, and animations and manipulating physics to create impressive mechanics for your games. You'll also learn how to code a simple AI agent to challenge the user and use profiling tools to ensure that the code runs in a performant way. Finally, you'll get to grips with Unity's AR Foundation for creating AR experiences for 3D apps and games.By the end of this book, you'll have developed a complete game and will have built a solid foundation using Unity's tooling ecosystem to develop game projects of any scale.

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!.

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.

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.

Flutter Design Patterns and Best Practices. Build scalable, maintainable, and production-ready apps using effective architectural principles

Daria Orlova, Esra Kadah, Jaime Blasco

Flutter’s rapid adoption by developers and businesses alike has led to an increased demand for skilled developers who can deliver high-quality Flutter apps. Flutter can be a great tool to develop apps for yourself, but you don’t always need to consider things like scalability or business goals as a hobbyist. When you build apps for a business, however, you must use specific tools to help the business achieve its goals. This requires solutions to be fast, reliable, and delivered on time. This book will help you meet these business requirements.You'll begin by learning how to build responsive UIs that work on all devices. Next, you'll delve into state management, understanding how to select the appropriate solution and gaining hands-on experience with InheritedWidget, ChangeNotifier, and BLoC. Later, you'll move on to high-level practices such as layered architecture, dependency injection, and repository patterns. The book will also show you how to develop features of any complexity, such as multithreading and native layer implementations. You'll also learn how to ensure the quality of your solutions by prioritizing testing.By the end of this book, you'll be able to deliver well-architected Flutter projects that are stable, scalable, and maintainable.

VMware vRealize Operations Performance and Capacity Management. A hands-on guide to mastering performance and capacity management in a virtual data center

Iwan 'e1' Rahabok

Adversarial Tradecraft in Cybersecurity. Offense versus defense in real-time computer conflict

Dan Borges

Little has been written about what to do when live hackers are on your system and running amok. Even experienced hackers tend to choke up when they realize the network defender has caught them and is zoning in on their implants in real time. This book will provide tips and tricks all along the kill chain of an attack, showing where hackers can have the upper hand in a live conflict and how defenders can outsmart them in this adversarial game of computer cat and mouse.This book contains two subsections in each chapter, specifically focusing on the offensive and defensive teams. It begins by introducing you to adversarial operations and principles of computer conflict where you will explore the core principles of deception, humanity, economy, and more about human-on-human conflicts. Additionally, you will understand everything from planning to setting up infrastructure and tooling that both sides should have in place.Throughout this book, you will learn how to gain an advantage over opponents by disappearing from what they can detect. You will further understand how to blend in, uncover other actors’ motivations and means, and learn to tamper with them to hinder their ability to detect your presence. Finally, you will learn how to gain an advantage through advanced research and thoughtfully concluding an operation.By the end of this book, you will have achieved a solid understanding of cyberattacks from both an attacker’s and a defender’s perspective.

Xamarin 4.x Cross-Platform Application Development. Click here to enter text. - Third Edition

Jonathan Peppers

Xamarin is a leading cross-platform application development tool used by top companies such as Coca-Cola, Honeywell, and Alaska Airlines to build apps. Version 4 features significant updates to the platform including the release of Xamarin.Forms 2.0 and improvements have been made to the iOS and Android designers. Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft so it is now a part of the Visual Studio family.This book will show you how to build applications for iOS, Android, and Windows. You will be walked through the process of creating an application that comes complete with a back-end web service and native features such as GPS location, camera, push notifications, and other core features. Additionally, you’ll learn how to use external libraries with Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms to create user interfaces. This book also provides instructions for Visual Studio and Windows. This edition has been updated with new screenshots and detailed steps to provide you with a holistic overview of the new features in Xamarin 4.