Internet of Things Programming Projects. Build modern IoT solutions with the Raspberry Pi 3 and Python

Colin Dow

The Internet of Things (IOT) has managed to attract the attention of researchers and tech enthusiasts, since it powerfully combines classical networks with instruments and devices.In Internet of Things Programming Projects, we unleash the power of Raspberry Pi and Python to create engaging projects. In the first part of the book, you’ll be introduced to the Raspberry Pi, learn how to set it up, and then jump right into Python programming. Then, you’ll dive into real-world computing by creating a“Hello World” app using flash LEDs.As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll go back to an age when analog needle meters ruled the world of data display. You’ll learn to retrieve weather data from a web service and display it on an analog needle meter, and build a home security system using the Raspberry Pi. The next project has a modern twist, where we employ the Raspberry Pi to send a signal to a web service that will send you a text when someone is at the door. In the final project, you take what you've learned from the previous two projects and create an IoT robot car that you can use to monitor what your pets are up to when you are away.By the end of this book, you will be well versed in almost every possible way to make your IoT projects stand out.

Building Smart LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Robots. Leverage the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 platform to build and program intelligent robots

Kyle Markland

Smart robots are an ever-increasing part of our daily lives. With LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3, you can now prototype your very own small-scale smart robot that uses specialized programming and hardware to complete a mission. EV3 is a robotics platform for enthusiasts of all ages and experience levels that makes prototyping robots accessible to all.This book will walk you through six different projects that range from intermediate to advanced level. The projects will show you building and programming techniques that are used by engineers in the real world, which will help you build your own smart robot.You'll see how to make the most of the EV3 robotics platform and build some awesome smart robots. The book starts by introducing some real-world examples of smart robots. Then, we'll walk you through six different projects and explain the features that allow these robots to make intelligent decisions. The book will guide you as you build your own object-tracking tank, a box-climbing robot, an interactive robotic shark, a quirky bipedal robot, a speedy remote control race car, and a GPS-navigating robot.By the end of this book, you'll have the skills necessary to build and program your own smart robots with EV3.

D3.js Quick Start Guide. Create amazing, interactive visualizations in the browser with JavaScript

Matthew Huntington

D3.js is a JavaScript library that allows you to create graphs and data visualizations in the browser with HTML, SVG, and CSS. This book will take you from the basics of D3.js, so that you can create your own interactive visualizations, to creating the most common graphs that you will encounter as a developer, scientist, statistician, or data scientist.The book begins with an overview of SVG, the basis for creating two-dimensional graphics in the browser. Once the reader has a firm understanding of SVG, we will tackle the basics of how to use D3.js to connect data to our SVG elements. We will start with a scatter plot that maps run data to circles on a graph, and expand our scatter plot to make it interactive. You will see how you can easily allow the users of your graph to create, edit, and delete run data by simply dragging and clicking the graph. Next, we will explore creating a bar graph, using external data from a mock API.After that, we will explore animations and motion with a bar graph, and use various physics-based forces to create a force-directed graph. Finally, we will look at how to use GeoJSON data to create a map.

Learning Salesforce Einstein. Add artificial intelligence capabilities to your business solutions with Heroku, PredictiveIO, and Force

Mohit Shrivatsava

Dreamforce 16 brought forth the latest addition to the Salesforce platform: an AI tool named Einstein. Einstein promises to provide users of all Salesforce applications with a powerful platform to help them gain deep insights into the data they work on. This book will introduce you to Einstein and help you integrate it into your respective business applications based on the Salesforce platform. We start off with an introduction to AI, then move on to look at how AI can make your CRM and apps smarter. Next, we discuss various out-of-the-box components added to sales, service, marketing, and community clouds from Salesforce to add Artificial Intelligence capabilities. Further on, we teach you how to use Heroku, PredictionIO, and the Force platform, along with Einstein, to build smarter apps. The core chapters focus on developer content and introduce PredictionIO and Salesforce Einstein Vision Services. We explore Einstein Predictive Vision Services, along with analytics cloud, the Einstein Data Discovery product, and IOT core concepts. Throughout the book, we also focus on how Einstein can be integrated into CRM and various clouds such as sales, services, marketing, and communities. By the end of the book, you will be able to embrace and leverage the power of Einstein, incorporating its functions to gain more knowledge. Salesforce developers will be introduced to the world of AI, while data scientists will gain insights into Salesforce’s various cloud offerings and how they can use Einstein’s capabilities and enhance applications.

AWS Administration Cookbook. Harness the full capability of AWS

Rowan Udell, Lucas Chan

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a bundled remote computing service that provides cloud computing infrastructure over the Internet with storage, bandwidth, and customized support for application programming interfaces (API). Implementing these services to efficiently administer your cloud environments is a core task.This book will help you build and administer your cloud environment with AWS. We’ll begin with the AWS fundamentals, and you’ll build the foundation for the recipes you’ll work on throughout the book. Next, you will find out how to manage multiple accounts and set up consolidated billing. You will then learn to set up reliable and fast hosting for static websites, share data between running instances, and back up your data for compliance. Moving on, you will find out how to use the compute service to enable consistent and fast instance provisioning, and will see how to provision storage volumes and autoscale an application server. Next, you’ll discover how to effectively use the networking and database service of AWS. You will also learn about the different management tools of AWS along with securing your AWS cloud. Finally, you will learn to estimate the costs for your cloud. By the end of the book, you will be able to easily administer your AWS cloud.

Hands-On Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading. Design and implement investment strategies based on smart algorithms that learn from data using Python

Stefan Jansen

The explosive growth of digital data has boosted the demand for expertise in trading strategies that use machine learning (ML). This book enables you to use a broad range of supervised and unsupervised algorithms to extract signals from a wide variety of data sources and create powerful investment strategies.This book shows how to access market, fundamental, and alternative data via API or web scraping and offers a framework to evaluate alternative data. You’ll practice the ML work?ow from model design, loss metric definition, and parameter tuning to performance evaluation in a time series context. You will understand ML algorithms such as Bayesian and ensemble methods and manifold learning, and will know how to train and tune these models using pandas, statsmodels, sklearn, PyMC3, xgboost, lightgbm, and catboost. This book also teaches you how to extract features from text data using spaCy, classify news and assign sentiment scores, and to use gensim to model topics and learn word embeddings from financial reports. You will also build and evaluate neural networks, including RNNs and CNNs, using Keras and PyTorch to exploit unstructured data for sophisticated strategies.Finally, you will apply transfer learning to satellite images to predict economic activity and use reinforcement learning to build agents that learn to trade in the OpenAI Gym.

CompTIA Server+ Certification Guide. A comprehensive, end-to-end study guide for the SK0-004 certification, along with mock exams

Ron Price

CompTIA Server+ Certification is one of the top 5 IT certifications that is vendor neutral.System administrators opt for CompTIA server+ Certification to gain advanced knowledge of concepts including troubleshooting and networking.This book will initially start with the configuration of a basic network server and the configuration for each of its myriad roles. The next set of chapters will provide an overview of the responsibilities and tasks performed by a system administrator to manage and maintain a network server. Moving ahead, you will learn the basic security technologies, methods, and procedures that can be applied to a server and its network. Next, you will cover the troubleshooting procedures and methods in general, and specifically for hardware, software, networks, storage devices, and security applications. Toward the end of this book, we will cover a number of troubleshooting and security mitigation concepts for running admin servers with ease. This guide will be augmented by test questions and mock papers that will help you obtain the necessary certification.By the end of this book, you will be in a position to clear Server+ Certification with ease.

Big Data Analytics with SAS. Get actionable insights from your Big Data using the power of SAS

David Pope

SAS has been recognized by Money Magazine and Payscale as one of the top business skills to learn in order to advance one’s career. Through innovative data management, analytics, and business intelligence software and services, SAS helps customers solve their business problems by allowing them to make better decisions faster. This book introduces the reader to the SAS and how they can use SAS to perform efficient analysis on any size data, including Big Data.The reader will learn how to prepare data for analysis, perform predictive, forecasting, and optimization analysis and then deploy or report on the results of these analyses. While performing the coding examples within this book the reader will learn how to use the web browser based SAS Studio and iPython Jupyter Notebook interfaces for working with SAS. Finally, the reader will learn how SAS’s architecture is engineered and designed to scale up and/or out and be combined with the open source offerings such as Hadoop, Python, and R. By the end of this book, you will be able to clearly understand how you can efficiently analyze Big Data using SAS.

Hands-On High Performance Programming with Qt 5

Mark Krajewski

Achieving efficient code through performance tuning is one of the key challenges faced by many programmers. This book looks at Qt programming from a performance perspective. You'll explore the performance problems encountered when using the Qt framework and means and ways to resolve them and optimize performance.   The book highlights performance improvements and new features released in Qt 5.9, Qt 5.11, and 5.12 (LTE). You'll master general computer performance best practices and tools, which can help you identify the reasons behind low performance, and the most common performance pitfalls experienced when using the Qt framework. In the following chapters, you'll explore multithreading and asynchronous programming with C++ and Qt and learn the importance and efficient use of data structures. You'll also get the opportunity to work through techniques such as memory management and design guidelines, which are essential to improve application performance. Comprehensive sections that cover all these concepts will prepare you for gaining hands-on experience of some of Qt's most exciting application fields - the mobile and embedded development domains.   By the end of this book, you'll be ready to build Qt applications that are more efficient, concurrent, and performance-oriented in nature  

Building Smart Drones with ESP8266 and Arduino. Build exciting drones by leveraging the capabilities of Arduino and ESP8266

Syed Omar Faruk Towaha

With the use of drones, DIY projects have taken off. Programmers are rapidly moving from traditional application programming to developing exciting multi-utility projects.This book will teach you to build industry-level drones with Arduino and ESP8266 and their modified versions of hardware.With this book, you will explore techniques for leveraging the tiny WiFi chip to enhance your drone and control it over a mobile phone. This book will start with teaching you how to solve problems while building your own WiFi controlled Arduino based drone. You will also learn how to build a Quadcopter and a mission critical drone. Moving on you will learn how to build a prototype drone that will be given a mission to complete which it will do it itself. You will also learn to build various exciting projects such as gliding and racing drones. By the end of this book you will learn how to maintain and troubleshoot your drone.By the end of this book, you will have learned to build drones using ESP8266 and Arduino and leverage their functionalities to the fullest.

Keras Reinforcement Learning Projects. 9 projects exploring popular reinforcement learning techniques to build self-learning agents

Giuseppe Ciaburro

Reinforcement learning has evolved a lot in the last couple of years and proven to be a successful technique in building smart and intelligent AI networks. Keras Reinforcement Learning Projects installs human-level performance into your applications using algorithms and techniques of reinforcement learning, coupled with Keras, a faster experimental library.The book begins with getting you up and running with the concepts of reinforcement learning using Keras. You’ll learn how to simulate a random walk using Markov chains and select the best portfolio using dynamic programming (DP) and Python. You’ll also explore projects such as forecasting stock prices using Monte Carlo methods, delivering vehicle routing application using Temporal Distance (TD) learning algorithms, and balancing a Rotating Mechanical System using Markov decision processes.Once you’ve understood the basics, you’ll move on to Modeling of a Segway, running a robot control system using deep reinforcement learning, and building a handwritten digit recognition model in Python using an image dataset. Finally, you’ll excel in playing the board game Go with the help of Q-Learning and reinforcement learning algorithms.By the end of this book, you’ll not only have developed hands-on training on concepts, algorithms, and techniques of reinforcement learning but also be all set to explore the world of AI.

Hands-On Artificial Intelligence for Beginners. An introduction to AI concepts, algorithms, and their implementation

Patrick D. Smith

Virtual Assistants, such as Alexa and Siri, process our requests, Google's cars have started to read addresses, and Amazon's prices and Netflix's recommended videos are decided by AI. Artificial Intelligence is one of the most exciting technologies and is becoming increasingly significant in the modern world.Hands-On Artificial Intelligence for Beginners will teach you what Artificial Intelligence is and how to design and build intelligent applications. This book will teach you to harness packages such as TensorFlow in order to create powerful AI systems. You will begin with reviewing the recent changes in AI and learning how artificial neural networks (ANNs) have enabled more intelligent AI. You'll explore feedforward, recurrent, convolutional, and generative neural networks (FFNNs, RNNs, CNNs, and GNNs), as well as reinforcement learning methods. In the concluding chapters, you'll learn how to implement these methods for a variety of tasks, such as generating text for chatbots, and playing board and video games.By the end of this book, you will be able to understand exactly what you need to consider when optimizing ANNs and how to deploy and maintain AI applications.

Programming Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Hone your skills and increase your productivity when programming in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 - Fifth Edition

Marije Brummel, David A. Studebaker, Christopher D. Studebaker, Luc van Vugt

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is a full business solution suite, and a complete ERP solution that contains a robust set of development tools to support customization and enhancement. These tools provide greater control over financials and can simplify supply chain, manufacturing, and operations.This book will take you from an introduction to Dynamics NAV and its integrated development tools to being a productive developer in the Dynamics NAV Development Environment. You will find this book very useful if you want to evaluate the product's development capabilities or need to manage Dynamics NAV based projects. It will teach you about the NAV application structure, the C/SIDE development environment, the C/AL language paired with the improved editor, the construction and uses of each object type, and how it all fits together to build universal applications. With this new edition, you will be able to understand how to design and develop using Patterns and new features such as Extensions and Events.

Docker and Kubernetes for Java Developers. Scale, deploy, and monitor multi-container applications

Jarosław Krochmalski

Imagine creating and testing Java EE applications on Apache Tomcat Server or Wildfly Application server in minutes along with deploying and managing Java applications swiftly. Sounds too good to be true? But you have a reason to cheer as such scenarios are only possible by leveraging Docker and Kubernetes.This book will start by introducing Docker and delve deep into its networking and persistent storage concepts. You will then proceed to learn how to refactor monolith application into separate services by building an application and then packaging it into Docker containers. Next, you will create an image containing Java Enterprise Application and later run it using Docker. Moving on, the book will focus on Kubernetes and its features and you will learn to deploy a Java application to Kubernetes using Maven and monitor a Java application in production. By the end of the book, you will get hands-on with some more advanced topics to further extend your knowledge about Docker and Kubernetes.

Artificial Intelligence for Big Data. Complete guide to automating Big Data solutions using Artificial Intelligence techniques

Anand Deshpande, Manish Kumar

In this age of big data, companies have larger amount of consumer data than ever before, far more than what the current technologies can ever hope to keep up with. However, Artificial Intelligence closes the gap by moving past human limitations in order to analyze data.With the help of Artificial Intelligence for big data, you will learn to use Machine Learning algorithms such as k-means, SVM, RBF, and regression to perform advanced data analysis. You will understand the current status of Machine and Deep Learning techniques to work on Genetic and Neuro-Fuzzy algorithms. In addition, you will explore how to develop Artificial Intelligence algorithms to learn from data, why they are necessary, and how they can help solve real-world problems.By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to implement various Artificial Intelligence algorithms for your big data systems and integrate them into your product offerings such as reinforcement learning, natural language processing, image recognition, genetic algorithms, and fuzzy logic systems.

.NET Core 2.0 By Example. Learn to program in C# and .NET Core by building a series of practical, cross-platform projects

Neha Shrivastava, Rishabh Verma

With the rise in the number of tools and technologies available today, developers and architects are always exploring ways to create better and smarter solutions. Before, the differences between target platforms was a major roadblock, but that's not the case now. .NET Core 2.0 By Example will take you on an exciting journey to building better software.This book provides fresh and relevant content to .NET Core 2.0 in a succinct format that’s enjoyable to read. It also delivers concepts, along with the implications, design decisions, and potential pitfalls you might face when targeting Linux and Windows systems, in a logical and simple way.With the .NET framework at its center, the book comprises of five varied projects: a multiplayer Tic-tac-toe game; a real-time chat application, Let'sChat; a chatbot; a microservice-based buying-selling application; and a movie booking application. You will start each chapter with a high-level overview of the content, followed by the above example applications described in detail. By the end of each chapter, you will not only be proficient with the concepts, but you’ll also have created a tangible component in the application.By the end of the book, you will have built five solid projects using all the tools and support provided by the .NET Core 2.0 framework.