User Experience Mapping. Enhance UX with User Story Map, Journey Map and Diagrams

Peter W. Szabo

Do you want to create better products and innovative solutions? User experience maps will help you understand your users and improve communication with them. Maps can also champion user-centricity within the organization.This book is the first print resource covering two advanced mapping techniques—the behavioral change map and the 4D UX map. You’ll explore user story maps, task models, and journey maps, while also creating wireflows, mental model maps, ecosystem maps, and solution maps. You’ll learn how to use insights from real users to create and improve your maps and products.The book delves into each major user experience map type, ranging from simple techniques based on sticky notes to more complex map types, and guides you in solving real-world problems with maps. You’ll understand how to create maps using a variety of software products, including Adobe Illustrator, Balsamiq Mockups, Axure RP, and Microsoft Word. Besides, you can draw each map type with pen and paper too!The book also showcases communication techniques and workshop ideas. You’ll learn about the Kaizen-UX management framework, developed by the author, now used by many agencies and in-house UX teams in Europe and beyond.Buying this book will give you hundreds of hours worth of user experience knowledge, from one of the world’s leading UX consultants. It will change your users’ world for the better. If you are still not convinced, we have hidden some cat drawings in it, just in case.

Splunk 7.x Quick Start Guide. Gain business data insights from operational intelligence

James H. Baxter

Splunk is a leading platform and solution for collecting, searching, and extracting value from ever increasing amounts of big data - and big data is eating the world! This book covers all the crucial Splunk topics and gives you the information and examples to get the immediate job done. You will find enough insights to support further research and use Splunk to suit any business environment or situation.Splunk 7.x Quick Start Guide gives you a thorough understanding of how Splunk works. You will learn about all the critical tasks for architecting, implementing, administering, and utilizing Splunk Enterprise to collect, store, retrieve, format, analyze, and visualize machine data. You will find step-by-step examples based on real-world experience and practical use cases that are applicable to all Splunk environments. There is a careful balance between adequate coverage of all the critical topics with short but relevant deep-dives into the configuration options and steps to carry out the day-to-day tasks that matter.By the end of the book, you will be a confident and proficient Splunk architect and administrator.

Mastering AWS Security. Create and maintain a secure cloud ecosystem

Albert Anthony

Mastering AWS Security starts with a deep dive into the fundamentals of the shared security responsibility model. This book tells you how you can enable continuous security, continuous auditing, and continuous compliance by automating your security in AWS with the tools, services, and features it provides.Moving on, you will learn about access control in AWS for all resources. You will also learn about the security of your network, servers, data and applications in the AWS cloud using native AWS security services. By the end of this book, you will understand the complete AWS Security landscape, covering all aspects of end - to -end software and hardware security along with logging, auditing, and compliance of your entire IT environment in the AWS cloud. Lastly, the book will wrap up with AWS best practices for security.

Hands-On Deep Learning for Games. Leverage the power of neural networks and reinforcement learning to build intelligent games

Micheal Lanham

The number of applications of deep learning and neural networks has multiplied in the last couple of years. Neural nets has enabled significant breakthroughs in everything from computer vision, voice generation, voice recognition and self-driving cars. Game development is also a key area where these techniques are being applied. This book will give an in depth view of the potential of deep learning and neural networks in game development. We will take a look at the foundations of multi-layer perceptron’s to using convolutional and recurrent networks. In applications from GANs that create music or textures to self-driving cars and chatbots. Then we introduce deep reinforcement learning through the multi-armed bandit problem and other OpenAI Gym environments.As we progress through the book we will gain insights about DRL techniques such as Motivated Reinforcement Learning with Curiosity and Curriculum Learning. We also take a closer look at deep reinforcement learning and in particular the Unity ML-Agents toolkit. By the end of the book, we will look at how to apply DRL and the ML-Agents toolkit to enhance, test and automate your games or simulations. Finally, we will cover your possible next steps and possible areas for future learning.

Hands-On Agile Software Development with JIRA. Design and manage software projects using the Agile methodology

David Harned

As teams scale in size, project management can get very complicated. One of the best tools to deal with this kind of problem is JIRA. This book will start by organizing your project requirements and the principles of Agile development to get you started. You will then be introduced to set up a JIRA account and the JIRA ecosystem to help you implement a dashboard for your team's work and issues. You will learn how to manage any issues and bugs that might emerge in the development stage. Going ahead, the book will help you build reports and use them to plan the releases based on the study of the reports. Towards the end, you will come across working with the gathered data and create a dashboard that helps you track the project's development.

Angular Design Patterns. Implement the Gang of Four patterns in your apps with Angular

Mathieu Nayrolles

This book is an insightful journey through the most valuable design patterns, and it will provide clear guidance on how to use them effectively in Angular. You will explore some of the best ways to work with Angular and how to use it to meet the stability and performance required in today's web development world. You’ll get to know some Angular best practices to improve your productivity and the code base of your application.We will take you on a journey through Angular designs for the real world, using a combination of case studies, design patterns to follow, and anti-patterns to avoid.By the end of the book, you will understand the various features of Angular, and will be able to apply well-known, industry-proven design patterns in your work.

Data Lake for Enterprises. Lambda Architecture for building enterprise data systems

Vivek Mishra, Tomcy John, Pankaj Misra

The term Data Lake has recently emerged as a prominent term in the big data industry. Data scientists can make use of it in deriving meaningful insights that can be used by businesses to redefine or transform the way they operate. Lambda architecture is also emerging as one of the very eminent patterns in the big data landscape, as it not only helps to derive useful information from historical data but also correlates real-time data to enable business to take critical decisions. This book tries to bring these two important aspects — data lake and lambda architecture—together.This book is divided into three main sections. The first introduces you to the concept of data lakes, the importance of data lakes in enterprises, and getting you up-to-speed with the Lambda architecture. The second section delves into the principal components of building a data lake using the Lambda architecture. It introduces you to popular big data technologies such as Apache Hadoop, Spark, Sqoop, Flume, and ElasticSearch. The third section is a highly practical demonstration of putting it all together, and shows you how an enterprise data lake can be implemented, along with several real-world use-cases. It also shows you how other peripheral components can be added to the lake to make it more efficient.By the end of this book, you will be able to choose the right big data technologies using the lambda architectural patterns to build your enterprise data lake.

Deployment with Docker. Apply continuous integration models, deploy applications quicker, and scale at large by putting Docker to work

Srdjan Grubor

Deploying Docker into production is considered to be one of the major pain points in developing large-scale infrastructures, and the documentation available online leaves a lot to be desired. With this book, you will learn everything you wanted to know to effectively scale your deployments globally and build a resilient, scalable, and containerized cloud platform for your own use.The book starts by introducing you to the containerization ecosystem with some concrete and easy-to-digest examples; after that, you will delve into examples of launching multiple instances of the same container. From there, you will cover orchestration, multi-node setups, volumes, and almost every relevant component of this new approach to deploying services. Using intertwined approaches, the book will cover battle-tested tooling, or issues likely to be encountered in real-world scenarios, in detail. You will also learn about the other supporting components required for a true PaaS deployment and discover common options to tie the whole infrastructure together.At the end of the book, you learn to build a small, but functional, PaaS (to appreciate the power of the containerized service approach) and continue to explore real-world approaches to implementing even larger global-scale services.

Microservices Deployment Cookbook. Deploy and manage scalable microservices

Vikram Murugesan

This book will help any team or organization understand, deploy, and manage microservices at scale. It is driven by a sample application, helping you gradually build a complete microservice-based ecosystem. Rather than just focusing on writing a microservice, this book addresses various other microservice-related solutions: deployments, clustering, load balancing, logging, streaming, and monitoring.The initial chapters offer insights into how web and enterprise apps can be migrated to scalable microservices. Moving on, you’ll see how to Dockerize your application so that it is ready to be shipped and deployed. We will look at how to deploy microservices on Mesos and Marathon and will also deploy microservices on Kubernetes. Next, you will implement service discovery and load balancing for your microservices. We’ll also show you how to build asynchronous streaming systems using Kafka Streams and Apache Spark. Finally, we wind up by aggregating your logs in Kafka, creating your own metrics, and monitoring the metrics for the microservice.

Hands-On GUI Programming with C++ and Qt5. Build stunning cross-platform applications and widgets with the most powerful GUI framework

Lee Zhi Eng

Qt 5, the latest version of Qt, enables you to develop applications with complex user interfaces for multiple targets. It provides you with faster and smarter ways to create modern UIs and applications for multiple platforms. This book will teach you to design and build graphical user interfaces that are functional, appealing, and user-friendly.In the initial part of the book, you will learn what Qt 5 is and what you can do with it. You will explore the Qt Designer, discover the different types of widgets generally used in Qt 5, and then connect your application to the database to perform dynamic operations. Next, you will be introduced to Qt 5 chart which allows you to easily render different types of graphs and charts and incorporate List View Widgets in your application. You will also work with various Qt modules, like QtLocation, QtWebEngine, and the networking module through the course of the book. Finally, we will focus on cross-platform development with QT 5 that enables you to code once and run it everywhere, including mobile platforms. By the end of this book, you will have successfully learned about high-end GUI applications and will be capable of building many more powerful, cross-platform applications.

Hands-On Neural Networks with Keras. Design and create neural networks using deep learning and artificial intelligence principles

Niloy Purkait

Neural networks are used to solve a wide range of problems in different areas of AI and deep learning. Hands-On Neural Networks with Keras will start with teaching you about the core concepts of neural networks. You will delve into combining different neural network models and work with real-world use cases, including computer vision, natural language understanding, synthetic data generation, and many more. Moving on, you will become well versed with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, autoencoders, and generative adversarial networks (GANs) using real-world training datasets. We will examine how to use CNNs for image recognition, how to use reinforcement learning agents, and many more. We will dive into the specific architectures of various networks and then implement each of them in a hands-on manner using industry-grade frameworks. By the end of this book, you will be highly familiar with all prominent deep learning models and frameworks, and the options you have when applying deep learning to real-world scenarios and embedding artificial intelligence as the core fabric of your organization.

MySQL 8 for Big Data. Effective data processing with MySQL 8, Hadoop, NoSQL APIs, and other Big Data tools

Shabbir Challawala, Chintan Mehta, Kandarp Patel, Jaydip Lakhatariya

With organizations handling large amounts of data on a regular basis, MySQL has become a popular solution to handle this structured Big Data. In this book, you will see how DBAs can use MySQL 8 to handle billions of records, and load and retrieve data with performance comparable or superior to commercial DB solutions with higher costs.Many organizations today depend on MySQL for their websites and a Big Data solution for their data archiving, storage, and analysis needs. However, integrating them can be challenging. This book will show you how to implement a successful Big Data strategy with Apache Hadoop and MySQL 8. It will cover real-time use case scenario to explain integration and achieve Big Data solutions using technologies such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Sqoop, and MySQL Applier. Also, the book includes case studies on Apache Sqoop and real-time event processing.By the end of this book, you will know how to efficiently use MySQL 8 to manage data for your Big Data applications.

Scala Design Patterns. Design modular, clean, and scalable applications by applying proven design patterns in Scala - Second Edition

Ivan Nikolov

Design patterns make developers’ lives easier by helping them write great software that is easy to maintain, runs efficiently, and is valuable to the company or people concerned. You’ll learn about the various features of Scala and will be able to apply well-known, industry-proven design patterns in your work. The book starts off by focusing on some of the most interesting and latest features of Scala while using practical real-world examples. We will be learning about IDE’s and Aspect Oriented Programming. We will be looking into different components in Scala. We will also cover the popular Gang of Four design patterns and show you how to incorporate functional patterns effectively. The book ends with a practical example that demonstrates how the presented material can be combined in real-life applications. You’ll learn the necessary concepts to build enterprise-grade applications. By the end of this book, you’ll have enough knowledge and understanding to quickly assess problems and come up with elegant solutions.

Learning Scala Programming. Object-oriented programming meets functional reactive to create Scalable and Concurrent programs

Vikash Sharma

Scala is a general-purpose programming language that supports both functional and object-oriented programming paradigms. Due to its concise design and versatility, Scala's applications have been extended to a wide variety of fields such as data science and cluster computing. You will learn to write highly scalable, concurrent, and testable programs to meet everyday software requirements.We will begin by understanding the language basics, syntax, core data types, literals, variables, and more. From here you will be introduced to data structures with Scala and you will learn to work with higher-order functions. Scala's powerful collections framework will help you get the best out of immutable data structures and utilize them effectively. You will then be introduced to concepts such as pattern matching, case classes, and functional programming features. From here, you will learn to work with Scala's object-oriented features. Going forward, you will learn about asynchronous and reactive programming with Scala, where you will be introduced to the Akka framework. Finally, you will learn the interoperability of Scala and Java.After reading this book, you'll be well versed with this language and its features, and you will be able to write scalable, concurrent, and reactive programs in Scala.

Introduction to Programming. Learn to program in Java with data structures, algorithms, and logic

Nick Samoylov

Have you ever thought about making your computer do what you want it to do? Do you want to learn to program, but just don't know where to start? Instead of guiding you in the right direction, have other learning resources got you confused with over-explanations?Don't worry. Look no further. Introduction to Programming is here to help.Written by an industry expert who understands the challenges faced by those from a non-programming background, this book takes a gentle, hand-holding approach to introducing you to the world of programming. Beginning with an introduction to what programming is, you'll go on to learn about languages, their syntax, and development environments. With plenty of examples for you to code alongside reading, the book's practical approach will help you to grasp everything it has to offer. More importantly, you'll understand several aspects of application development. As a result, you'll have your very own application running by the end of the book. To help you comprehensively understand Java programming, there are exercises at the end of each chapter to keep things interesting and encourage you to add your own personal touch to the code and, ultimately, your application.

Tkinter GUI Application Development Cookbook. A practical solution to your GUI development problems with Python and Tkinter

Alejandro Rodas de Paz

As one of the more versatile programming languages, Python is well-known for its batteries-included philosophy, which includes a rich set of modules in its standard library; Tkinter is the library included for building desktop applications. Due to this, Tkinter is a common choice for rapid GUI development, and more complex applications can benefit from the full capabilities of this library. This book covers all of your Tkinter and Python GUI development problems and solutions.Tkinter GUI Application Development Cookbook starts with an overview of Tkinter classes and at the same time provides recipes for basic topics, such as layout patterns and event handling. Next, we cover how to develop common GUI patterns, such as entering and saving data, navigating through menus and dialogs, and performing long-running actions in the background.You can then make your apps leverage network resources effectively and perform graphical operations on a canvas and related tasks such as detecting collisions between items. Finally, this book covers using themed widgets, an extension of Tk widgets that have a more native look and feel. Finally, this book covers using the canvas and themed widgets.By the end of the book, you will have an in-depth knowledge of Tkinter classes, and will know how to use them to build efficient and rich GUI applications.