Android Development with Kotlin. Enhance your skills for Android development using Kotlin

Igor Wojda, Marcin Moskala

Nowadays, improved application development does not just mean building better performing applications. It has become crucial to find improved ways of writing code. Kotlin is a language that helps developers build amazing Android applications easily and effectively. This book discusses Kotlin features in context of Android development. It demonstrates how common examples that are typical for Android development, can be simplified using Kotlin. It also shows all the benefits, improvements and new possibilities provided by this language.The book is divided in three modules that show the power of Kotlin and teach you how to use it properly. Each module present features in different levels of advancement. The first module covers Kotlin basics. This module will lay a firm foundation for the rest of the chapters so you are able to read and understand most of the Kotlin code. The next module dives deeper into the building blocks of Kotlin, such as functions, classes, and function types. You will learn how Kotlin brings many improvements to the table by improving common Java concepts and decreasing code verbosity. The last module presents features that are not present in Java. You will learn how certain tasks can be achieved in simpler ways thanks to Kotlin.Through the book, you will learn how to use Kotlin for Android development. You will get to know and understand most important Kotlin features, and how they can be used. You will be ready to start your own adventure with Android development with Kotlin.

Security Automation with Ansible 2. Leverage Ansible 2 to automate complex security tasks like application security, network security, and malware analysis

Akash Mahajan, MADHU AKULA

Security automation is one of the most interesting skills to have nowadays. Ansible allows you to write automation procedures once and use them across your entire infrastructure. This book will teach you the best way to use Ansible for seemingly complex tasks by using the various building blocks available and creating solutions that are easy to teach others, store for later, perform version control on, and repeat.We’ll start by covering various popular modules and writing simple playbooks to showcase those modules. You’ll see how this can be applied over a variety of platforms and operating systems, whether they are Windows/Linux bare metal servers or containers on a cloud platform. Once the bare bones automation is in place, you’ll learn how to leverage tools such as Ansible Tower or even Jenkins to create scheduled repeatable processes around security patching, security hardening, compliance reports, monitoring of systems, and so on. Moving on, you’ll delve into useful security automation techniques and approaches, and learn how to extend Ansible for enhanced security. While on the way, we will tackle topics like how to manage secrets, how to manage all the playbooks that we will create and how to enable collaboration using Ansible Galaxy. In the final stretch, we’ll tackle how to extend the modules of Ansible for our use, and do all the previous tasks in a programmatic manner to get even more powerful automation frameworks and rigs.

Building Serverless Architectures. Unleash the power of AWS Lambdas for your applications

Cagatay Gurturk

Over the past years, all kind of companies from start-ups to giant enterprises started their move to public cloud providers in order to save their costs and reduce the operation effort needed to keep their shops open. Now it is even possible to craft a complex software system consisting of many independent micro-functions that will run only when they are needed without needing to maintain individual servers.The focus of this book is to design serverless architectures, and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, along with decision factors to consider. You will learn how to design a serverless application, get to know that key points of services that serverless applications are based on, and known issues and solutions.The book addresses key challenges such as how to slice out the core functionality of the software to be distributed in different cloud services and cloud functions. It covers basic and advanced usage of these services, testing and securing the serverless software, automating deployment, and more.By the end of the book, you will be equipped with knowledge of new tools and techniques to keep up with this evolution in the IT industry.

Hands-On Chatbots and Conversational UI Development. Build chatbots and voice user interfaces with Chatfuel, Dialogflow, Microsoft Bot Framework, Twilio, and Alexa Skills

Srini Janarthanam

Conversation as an interface is the best way for machines to interact with us using the universally accepted human tool that is language. Chatbots and voice user interfaces are two flavors of conversational UIs. Chatbots are real-time, data-driven answer engines that talk in natural language and are context-aware. Voice user interfaces are driven by voice and can understand and respond to users using speech. This book covers both types of conversational UIs by leveraging APIs from multiple platforms. We'll take a project-based approach to understand how these UIs are built and the best use cases for deploying them. We'll start by building a simple messaging bot from the Facebook Messenger API to understand the basics of bot building. Then we move on to creating a Task model that can perform complex tasks such as ordering and planning events with the newly-acquired-by-Google Dialogflow and Microsoft Bot framework. We then turn to voice-enabled UIs that are capable of interacting with users using speech with Amazon Alexa and Google Home. By the end of the book, you will have created your own line of chatbots and voice UIs for multiple leading platforms.

TensorFlow Machine Learning Projects. Build 13 real-world projects with advanced numerical computations using the Python ecosystem

Ankit Jain, Armando Fandango, Amita Kapoor

TensorFlow has transformed the way machine learning is perceived. TensorFlow Machine Learning Projects teaches you how to exploit the benefits—simplicity, efficiency, and flexibility—of using TensorFlow in various real-world projects. With the help of this book, you’ll not only learn how to build advanced projects using different datasets but also be able to tackle common challenges using a range of libraries from the TensorFlow ecosystem.To start with, you’ll get to grips with using TensorFlow for machine learning projects; you’ll explore a wide range of projects using TensorForest and TensorBoard for detecting exoplanets, TensorFlow.js for sentiment analysis, and TensorFlow Lite for digit classification.As you make your way through the book, you’ll build projects in various real-world domains, incorporating natural language processing (NLP), the Gaussian process, autoencoders, recommender systems, and Bayesian neural networks, along with trending areas such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), capsule networks, and reinforcement learning. You’ll learn how to use the TensorFlow on Spark API and GPU-accelerated computing with TensorFlow to detect objects, followed by how to train and develop a recurrent neural network (RNN) model to generate book scripts.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the required expertise to build full-fledged machine learning projects at work.

Wearable-Tech Projects with the Raspberry Pi Zero. Create imaginative, real-world wearable tech projects with the Rapsberry Pi Zero

Jonathan Witts

With Wearable-Tech Projects with the Raspberry Pi Zero, you will begin with learning how to install the required software for your upcoming projects. You will also learn how to control electronic devices with the GPIOZero Python library. Next, you will be creating some stylish wearable-tech projects such as a motion-reactive LED cap and a Tweet-activated LED T-shirt. Toward the end of the book, you will be creating some useful health and fitness wearable-tech projects; these will help you monitor your heart rate, track your movements with GPS, and count your footsteps with your own pedometer.By the end of the book, you will have created a range of wearable-tech projects and learned enough about your Raspberry Pi Zero that you should be able to adapt these projects further or come up with your own creations!

Learning VMware NSX. Next-generation network administration skills revealed - Second Edition

Ranjit Singh Thakurratan

VMware NSX is a platform for the software-defined data center. It allows complex networking topologies to be deployed programmatically in seconds. SDNs allow ease of deployment, management, and automation in deploying and maintaining new networks while reducing and in some cases completely eliminating the need to deploy traditional networks. The book allows you a thorough understanding of implementing Software defined networks using VMware’s NSX. You will come across the best practices for installing and configuring NSX to setup your environment. Then you will get a brief overview of the NSX Core Components NSX’s basic architecture. Once you are familiar with everything, you will get to know how to deploy various NSX features. Furthermore, you will understand how to manage and monitor NSX and its associated services and features. In addition to this, you will also explore the best practices for NSX deployments. By the end of the book, you will be able to deploy Vmware NSX in your own environment with ease. This book can come handy if you are preparing for VMware NSX certification.

C++ Reactive Programming. Design concurrent and asynchronous applications using the RxCpp library and Modern C++17

Praseed Pai, Peter Abraham

Reactive programming is an effective way to build highly responsive applications with an easy-to-maintain code base. This book covers the essential functional reactive concepts that will help you build highly concurrent, event-driven, and asynchronous applications in a simpler and less error-prone way.C++ Reactive Programming begins with a discussion on how event processing was undertaken by different programming systems earlier. After a brisk introduction to modern C++ (C++17), you’ll be taken through language-level concurrency and the lock-free programming model to set the stage for our foray into the Functional Programming model. Following this, you’ll be introduced to RxCpp and its programming model. You’ll be able to gain deep insights into the RxCpp library, which facilitates reactive programming. You’ll learn how to deal with reactive programming using Qt/C++ (for the desktop) and C++ microservices for the Web.By the end of the book, you will be well versed with advanced reactive programming concepts in modern C++ (C++17).

Learning C for Arduino. A comprehensive guide that will help you ace C's fundamentals using the powerful Arduino board

Syed Omar Faruk Towaha

This book will start with the fundamentals of C programming and programming topics, such data types, functions, decision making, program loops, pointers, and structures, with the help of an Arduino board. Then you will get acquainted with Arduino interactions with sensors, LEDs, and autonomous systems and setting up the Arduino environment. Moving on you will also learn how to work on the digital and analog I/O, establish serial communications with autonomous systems, and integrate with electronic devices. By the end of the book, you will be able to make basic projects such as LED cube and smart weather system that leverages C.

Mastering Arduino. A project-based approach to electronics, circuits, and programming

Jon Hoffman

Mastering Arduino is an all-in-one guide to getting the most out of your Arduino. This practical, no-nonsense guide teaches you all of the electronics and programming skills that you need to create advanced Arduino projects. This book is packed full of real-world projects for you to practice on, bringing all of the knowledge in the book together and giving you the skills to build your own robot from the examples in this book. The final two chapters discuss wireless technologies and how they can be used in your projects. The book begins with the basics of electronics, making sure that you understand components, circuits, and prototyping before moving on. It then performs the same function for code, getting you into the Arduino IDE and showing you how to connect the Arduino to a computer and run simple projects on your Arduino.Once the basics are out of the way, the next 10 chapters of the book focus on small projects centered around particular components, such as LCD displays, stepper motors, or voice synthesizers. Each of these chapters will get you familiar with the technology involved, how to build with it, how to program it, and how it can be used in your own projects.

Statistical Application Development with R and Python. Develop applications using data processing, statistical models, and CART - Second Edition

Prabhanjan Narayanachar Tattar

Statistical Analysis involves collecting and examining data to describe the nature of data that needs to be analyzed. It helps you explore the relation of data and build models to make better decisions.This book explores statistical concepts along with R and Python, which are well integrated from the word go. Almost every concept has an R code going with it which exemplifies the strength of R and applications. The R code and programs have been further strengthened with equivalent Python programs. Thus, you will first understand the data characteristics, descriptive statistics and the exploratory attitude, which will give you firm footing of data analysis. Statistical inference will complete the technical footing of statistical methods. Regression, linear, logistic modeling, and CART, builds the essential toolkit. This will help you complete complex problems in the real world.You will begin with a brief understanding of the nature of data and end with modern and advanced statistical models like CART. Every step is taken with DATA and R code, and further enhanced by Python.The data analysis journey begins with exploratory analysis, which is more than simple, descriptive, data summaries. You will then apply linear regression modeling, and end with logistic regression, CART, and spatial statistics.By the end of this book you will be able to apply your statistical learning in major domains at work or in your projects.

Command Line Fundamentals. Learn to use the Unix command-line tools and Bash shell scripting

Vivek Nagarajan

The most basic interface to a computer—the command line—remains the most flexible and powerful way of processing data and performing and automating various day-to-day tasks. Command Line Fundamentals begins by exploring the basics, and then focuses on the most common tool, the Bash shell (which is standard on all Linux and iOS systems). As you make your way through the book, you'll explore the traditional Unix command-line programs as implemented by the GNU project. You'll also learn to use redirection and pipelines to assemble these programs to solve complex problems. By the end of this book, you'll have explored the basics of shell scripting, allowing you to easily and quickly automate tasks.

Learn Blockchain Programming with JavaScript. Build your very own Blockchain and decentralized network with JavaScript and Node.js

Eric Traub

Learn Blockchain Programming with JavaScript begins by giving you a clear understanding of what blockchain technology is. You’ll then set up an environment to build your very own blockchain and you’ll add various functionalities to it. By adding functionalities to your blockchain such as the ability to mine new blocks, create transactions, and secure your blockchain through a proof-of-work you’ll gain an in-depth understanding of how blockchain technology functions.As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll learn how to build an API server to interact with your blockchain and how to host your blockchain on a decentralized network. You’ll also build a consensus algorithm and use it to verify data and keep the entire blockchain network synchronized. In the concluding chapters, you’ll finish building your blockchain prototype and gain a thorough understanding of why blockchain technology is so secure and valuable. By the end of this book, you'll understand how decentralized blockchain networks function and why decentralization is such an important feature for securing a blockchain.

Manage Your SAP Projects with SAP Activate. Implementing SAP S/4HANA

Vinay Singh

It has been a general observation that most SAP consultants and professionals are used to the conventional waterfall methodology. Traditionally, this method has been there for ages and we all grew up learning about it and started practicing it in real world. The evolution of agile methodology has revolutionized the way we manage our projects and businesses. SAP Activate is an innovative, next generation business suite that allows producing working deliverables straight away. Manage your SAP Project with SAP Activate, will take your learning to the next level. The book promises to make you understand and practice the SAP Activate Framework. The focus is to take you on a journey of all the phases of SAP Activate methodology and make you understand all the phases with real time project examples. The author explains how SAP Activate methodology can be used through real-world use cases, with a comprehensive discussion on Agile and Scrum, in the context of SAP Project.You will get familiar with SAP S4HANA which is an incredibly innovative platform for businesses which can store business data, interpret it, analyze it, process it in real time, and use it when it's needed depending upon the business requirement.

CompTIA Project+ Certification Guide. Learn project management best practices and successfully pass the CompTIA Project+ PK0-004 exam

J. Ashley Hunt

The CompTIA Project+ exam is designed for IT professionals who want to improve their career trajectory by gaining certification in project management specific to their industry. This guide covers everything necessary to pass the current iteration of the Project+ PK0-004 exam.The CompTIA Project+ Certification Guide starts by covering project initiation best practices, including an understanding of organizational structures, team roles, and responsibilities. You’ll then study best practices for developing a project charter and the scope of work to produce deliverables necessary to obtain formal approval of the end result. The ability to monitor your project work and make changes as necessary to bring performance back in line with the plan is the difference between a successful and unsuccessful project. The concluding chapters of the book provide best practices to help keep an eye on your projects and close them out successfully. The guide also includes practice questions created to mirror the exam experience and help solidify your understanding of core project management concepts.By the end of this book, you will be able to develop creative solutions for complex issues faced in project management.

Machine Learning with the Elastic Stack. Expert techniques to integrate machine learning with distributed search and analytics

Rich Collier, Bahaaldine Azarmi

Machine Learning with the Elastic Stack is a comprehensive overview of the embedded commercial features of anomaly detection and forecasting. The book starts with installing and setting up Elastic Stack. You will perform time series analysis on varied kinds of data, such as log files, network flows, application metrics, and financial data.As you progress through the chapters, you will deploy machine learning within the Elastic Stack for logging, security, and metrics. In the concluding chapters, you will see how machine learning jobs can be automatically distributed and managed across the Elasticsearch cluster and made resilient to failure.By the end of this book, you will understand the performance aspects of incorporating machine learning within the Elastic ecosystem and create anomaly detection jobs and view results from Kibana directly.