Unity 2017 Game Optimization. Optimize all aspects of Unity performance - Second Edition

Chris Dickinson

Unity is an awesome game development engine. Through its massive feature-set and ease-of-use, Unity helps put some of the best processing and rendering technology in the hands of hobbyists and professionals alike.This book shows you how to make your games fly with the recent version of Unity 2017, and demonstrates that high performance does not need to be limited to games with the biggest teams and budgets.Since nothing turns gamers away from a game faster than a poor user-experience, the book starts by explaining how to use the Unity Profiler to detect problems. You will learn how to use stopwatches, timers and logging methods to diagnose the problem. You will then explore techniques to improve performance through better programming practices. Moving on, you will then learn about Unity’s built-in batching processes; when they can be used to improve performance, and their limitations. Next, you will import your art assets using minimal space, CPU and memory at runtime, and discover some underused features and approaches for managing asset data. You will also improve graphics, particle system and shader performance with a series of tips and tricks to make the most of GPU parallel processing. You will then delve into the fundamental layers of the Unity3D engine to discuss some issues that may be difficult to understand without a strong knowledge of its inner-workings. The book also introduces you to the critical performance problems for VR projects and how to tackle them.By the end of the book, you will have learned to improve the development workflow by properly organizing assets and ways to instantiate assets as quickly and waste-free as possible via object pooling.

Containers in OpenStack. Leverage OpenStack services to make the most of Docker, Kubernetes and Mesos

Madhuri Kumari, Pradeep Kumar Singh

Containers are one of the most talked about technologies of recent times. They have become increasingly popular as they are changing the way we develop, deploy, and run software applications. OpenStack gets tremendous traction as it is used by many organizations across the globe and as containers gain in popularity and become complex, it’s necessary for OpenStack to provide various infrastructure resources for containers, such as compute, network, and storage.Containers in OpenStack answers the question, how can OpenStack keep ahead of the increasing challenges of container technology? You will start by getting familiar with container and OpenStack basics, so that you understand how the container ecosystem and OpenStack work together. To understand networking, managing application services and deployment tools, the book has dedicated chapters for different OpenStack projects: Magnum, Zun, Kuryr, Murano, and Kolla. Towards the end, you will be introduced to some best practices to secure your containers and COE on OpenStack, with an overview of using each OpenStack projects for different use cases.

Numerical Computing with Python. Harness the power of Python to analyze and find hidden patterns in the data

Pratap Dangeti, Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim, ...

Data mining, or parsing the data to extract useful insights, is a niche skill that can transform your career as a data scientist Python is a flexible programming language that is equipped with a strong suite of libraries and toolkits, and gives you the perfect platform to sift through your data and mine the insights you seek. This Learning Path is designed to familiarize you with the Python libraries and the underlying statistics that you need to get comfortable with data mining.You will learn how to use Pandas, Python's popular library to analyze different kinds of data, and leverage the power of Matplotlib to generate appealing and impressive visualizations for the insights you have derived. You will also explore different machine learning techniques and statistics that enable you to build powerful predictive models.By the end of this Learning Path, you will have the perfect foundation to take your data mining skills to the next level and set yourself on the path to become a sought-after data science professional.This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products:• Statistics for Machine Learning by Pratap Dangeti• Matplotlib 2.x By Example by Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim• Pandas Cookbook by Theodore Petrou

Elasticsearch 5.x Cookbook. Distributed Search and Analytics - Third Edition

Alberto Paro

Elasticsearch is a Lucene-based distributed search server that allows users to index and search unstructured content with petabytes of data. This book is your one-stop guide to master the complete Elasticsearch ecosystem. We’ll guide you through comprehensive recipes on what’s new in Elasticsearch 5.x, showing you how to create complex queries and analytics, and perform index mapping, aggregation, and scripting. Further on, you will explore the modules of Cluster and Node monitoring and see ways to back up and restore a snapshot of an index. You will understand how to install Kibana to monitor a cluster and also to extend Kibana for plugins. Finally, you will also see how you can integrate your Java, Scala, Python, and Big Data applications such as Apache Spark and Pig with Elasticsearch, and add enhanced functionalities with custom plugins.By the end of this book, you will have an in-depth knowledge of the implementation of the Elasticsearch architecture and will be able to manage data efficiently and effectively with Elasticsearch.

Domain-Driven Design in PHP. A Highly Practical Guide

Keyvan Akbary, Carlos Buenosvinos, Christian Soronellas

Domain-Driven Design (DDD) has arrived in the PHP community, but for all the talk, there is very little real code. Without being in a training session and with no PHP real examples, learning DDD can be challenging. This book changes all that. It details how to implement tactical DDD patterns and gives full examples of topics such as integrating Bounded Contexts with REST, and DDD messaging strategies. In this book, the authors show you, with tons of details and examples, how to properly design Entities, Value Objects, Services, Domain Events, Aggregates, Factories, Repositories, Services, and Application Services with PHP. They show how to apply Hexagonal Architecture within your application whether you use an open source framework or your own.

Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane. Automating mobile application development and deployment for iOS and Android

Doron Katz

Competitive mobile apps depend strongly on the development team’s ability to deliver successful releases, consistently and often. Although continuous integration took a more mainstream priority among the development industry, companies are starting to realize the importance of continuity beyond integration and testing. This book starts off with a brief introduction to fastlane—a robust command-line tool that enables iOS and Android developers to automate their releasing workflow. The book then explores and guides you through all of its features and utilities; it provides the reader a comprehensive understanding of the tool and how to implement them. Themes include setting up and managing your certificates and provisioning and push notification profiles; automating the creation of apps and managing the app metadata on iTunes Connect and the Apple Developer Portal; and building, distributing and publishing your apps to the App Store. You will also learn how to automate the generation of localized screenshots and mesh your continuous delivery workflow into a continuous integration workflow for a more robust setup. By the end of the book, you will gain substantial knowledge on delivering bug free, developer-independent, and stable application release cycle.

Hands-On Geospatial Analysis with R and QGIS. A beginner’s guide to manipulating, managing, and analyzing spatial data using R and QGIS 3.2.2

Shammunul Islam

Managing spatial data has always been challenging and it's getting more complex as the size of data increases. Spatial data is actually big data and you need different tools and techniques to work your way around to model and create different workflows. R and QGIS have powerful features that can make this job easier.This book is your companion for applying machine learning algorithms on GIS and remote sensing data. You’ll start by gaining an understanding of the nature of spatial data and installing R and QGIS. Then, you’ll learn how to use different R packages to import, export, and visualize data, before doing the same in QGIS. Screenshots are included to ease your understanding.Moving on, you’ll learn about different aspects of managing and analyzing spatial data, before diving into advanced topics. You’ll create powerful data visualizations using ggplot2, ggmap, raster, and other packages of R. You’ll learn how to use QGIS 3.2.2 to visualize and manage (create, edit, and format) spatial data. Different types of spatial analysis are also covered using R. Finally, you’ll work with landslide data from Bangladesh to create a landslide susceptibility map using different machine learning algorithms.By reading this book, you’ll transition from being a beginner to an intermediate user of GIS and remote sensing data in no time.

React Design Patterns and Best Practices. Build easy to scale modular applications using the most powerful components and design patterns

Michele Bertoli

Taking a complete journey through the most valuable design patterns in React, this book demonstrates how to apply design patterns and best practices in real-life situations, whether that’s for new or already existing projects. It will help you to make your applications more flexible, perform better, and easier to maintain – giving your workflow a huge boost when it comes to speed without reducing quality. We’ll begin by understanding the internals of React before gradually moving on to writing clean and maintainable code. We’ll build components that are reusable across the application, structure applications, and create forms that actually work.Then we’ll style React components and optimize them to make applications faster and more responsive. Finally, we’ll write tests effectively and you’ll learn how to contribute to React and its ecosystem.By the end of the book, you’ll be saved from a lot of trial and error and developmental headaches, and you will be on the road to becoming a React expert.

Hands-On Networking with Azure. Build large-scale, real-world apps using Azure networking solutions

Mohamed Waly

Microsoft Azure networking is one of the most valuable and important offerings in Azure. No matter what solution you are building for the cloud, you'll fi nd a compelling use for it. This book will get you up to speed quickly on Microsoft Azure Networking by teaching you how to use different networking services.By reading this book, you will develop a strong networking foundation for Azure virtual machines and for expanding your on-premise environment to Azure. Hands-On Networking with Azure starts with an introduction to Microsoft Azure networking and creating Azure Virtual Networks with subnets of different types within them. The book helps you understand the architecture of Azure networks. You will then learn the best practices for designing both Windows- and Linux-based Azure VM networks. You will also learn to expand your networks into Azure and how to use Azure DNS. Moreover, you will master best practices for dealing with Azure Load Balancer and the solutions they offer in different scenarios. Finally, we will demonstrate how the Azure Application Gateway works, offering various layer-7 load balancing capabilities for applications. By the end of this book, you will be able to architect your networking solutions for Azure.

Artificial Intelligence By Example. Develop machine intelligence from scratch using real artificial intelligence use cases

Denis Rothman

Artificial intelligence has the potential to replicate humans in every field. Artificial Intelligence By Example serves as a starting point for you to understand how AI is built, with the help of intriguing examples and case studies.Artificial Intelligence By Example will make you an adaptive thinker and help you apply concepts to real-life scenarios. Using some of the most interesting AI examples, right from a simple chess engine to a cognitive chatbot, you will learn how to tackle the machine you are competing with. You will study some of the most advanced machine learning models, understand how to apply AI to blockchain and IoT, and develop emotional quotient in chatbots using neural networks.You will move on to designing AI solutions in a simple manner rather than get confused by complex architectures and techniques. This comprehensive guide will be a starter kit for you to develop AI applications on your own.By the end of this book, you will have understood the fundamentals of AI and worked through a number of case studies that will help you develop your business vision.

Machine Learning with R Quick Start Guide. A beginner's guide to implementing machine learning techniques from scratch using R 3.5

Iván Pastor Sanz

Machine Learning with R Quick Start Guide takes you on a data-driven journey that starts with the very basics of R and machine learning. It gradually builds upon core concepts so you can handle the varied complexities of data and understand each stage of the machine learning pipeline.From data collection to implementing Natural Language Processing (NLP), this book covers it all. You will implement key machine learning algorithms to understand how they are used to build smart models. You will cover tasks such as clustering, logistic regressions, random forests, support vector machines, and more. Furthermore, you will also look at more advanced aspects such as training neural networks and topic modeling.By the end of the book, you will be able to apply the concepts of machine learning, deal with data-related problems, and solve them using the powerful yet simple language that is R.

Hands-On Microservices with Kotlin. Build reactive and cloud-native microservices with Kotlin using Spring 5 and Spring Boot 2.0

Juan Antonio Medina Iglesias

With Google's inclusion of first-class support for Kotlin in their Androidecosystem, Kotlin's future as a mainstream language is assured. Microservices helpdesign scalable, easy-to-maintain web applications; Kotlin allows us to takeadvantage of modern idioms to simplify our development and create high-qualityservices. With 100% interoperability with the JVM, Kotlin makes working withexisting Java code easier. Well-known Java systems such as Spring, Jackson, andReactor have included Kotlin modules to exploit its language features.This book guides the reader in designing and implementing services, and producingproduction-ready, testable, lean code that's shorter and simpler than a traditionalJava implementation. Reap the benefits of using the reactive paradigm and takeadvantage of non-blocking techniques to take your services to the next level in termsof industry standards. You will consume NoSQL databases reactively to allow youto create high-throughput microservices. Create cloud-native microservices thatcan run on a wide range of cloud providers, and monitor them. You will create Dockercontainers for your microservices and scale them. Finally, you will deploy yourmicroservices in OpenShift Online.

Mastering Android Development with Kotlin. Deep dive into the world of Android to create robust applications with Kotlin

Miloš Vasić

Kotlin is a programming language intended to be a better Java, and it's designed to be usable and readable across large teams with different levels of knowledge. As a language, it helps developers build amazing Android applications in an easy and effective way.This book begins by giving you a strong grasp of Kotlin's features in the context of Android development and its APIs. Moving on, you'll take steps towards building stunning applications for Android. The book will show you how to set up the environment, and the difficulty level will grow steadily with the applications covered in the upcoming chapters.Later on, the book will introduce you to the Android Studio IDE, which plays an integral role in Android development. We'll use Kotlin's basic programming concepts such as functions, lambdas, properties, object-oriented code, safety aspects, type parameterization, testing, and concurrency, which will guide you through writing Kotlin code in production. We'll also show you how to integrate Kotlininto any existing Android project.

Pentaho 8 Reporting for Java Developers. Create pixel-perfect analytical reports using reporting tools

Francesco Corti

This hands-on tutorial, filled with exercises and examples, introduces the reader to a variety of concepts within Pentaho Reporting. With screenshots that show you how reports look at design time as well as how they should look when rendered as PDF, Excel, HTML, Text, Rich-Text-File, XML, and CSV, this book also contains complete example source code that you can copy and paste into your environment to get up-and-running quickly. Updated to cover the features of Pentaho 8, this book will teach you everything you need to know to build fast, efficient reports using Pentaho. If your interest lies in the technical details of creating reports and you want to see how to solve common reporting problems with a minimum of fuss, this is the book for you.

Hands-On System Programming with C++. Build performant and concurrent Unix and Linux systems with C++17

Dr. Rian Quinn

C++ is a general-purpose programming language with a bias toward system programming as it provides ready access to hardware-level resources, efficient compilation, and a versatile approach to higher-level abstractions.This book will help you understand the benefits of system programming with C++17. You will gain a firm understanding of various C, C++, and POSIX standards, as well as their respective system types for both C++ and POSIX. After a brief refresher on C++, Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII), and the new C++ Guideline Support Library (GSL), you will learn to program Linux and Unix systems along with process management. As you progress through the chapters, you will become acquainted with C++'s support for IO. You will then study various memory management methods, including a chapter on allocators and how they benefit system programming. You will also explore how to program file input and output and learn about POSIX sockets. This book will help you get to grips with safely setting up a UDP and TCP server/client.Finally, you will be guided through Unix time interfaces, multithreading, and error handling with C++ exceptions. By the end of this book, you will be comfortable with using C++ to program high-quality systems.

Distributed Computing with Go. Practical concurrency and parallelism for Go applications

V.N. Nikhil Anurag

Distributed Computing with Go gives developers with a good idea how basic Go development works the tools to fulfill the true potential of Golang development in a world of concurrent web and cloud applications. Nikhil starts out by setting up a professional Go development environment. Then you’ll learn the basic concepts and practices of Golang concurrent and parallel development. You’ll find out in the new few chapters how to balance resources and data with REST and standard web approaches while keeping concurrency in mind. Most Go applications these days will run in a data center or on the cloud, which is a condition upon which the next chapter depends. There, you’ll expand your skills considerably by writing a distributed document indexing system during the next two chapters. This system has to balance a large corpus of documents with considerable analytical demands. Another use case is the way in which a web application written in Go can be consciously redesigned to take distributed features into account. The chapter is rather interesting for Go developers who have to migrate existing Go applications to computationally and memory-intensive environments. The final chapter relates to the rather onerous task of testing parallel and distributed applications, something that is not usually taught in standard computer science curricula.