Mastering Blockchain. Distributed ledger technology, decentralization, and smart contracts explained - Second Edition

Imran Bashir

Publisher's Note: This edition from 2018 is outdated and does not cover the latest insights on consensus algorithms, Ethereum 2.0, tokenization, and enterprise blockchains. A new and updated edition of this book that includes all the newest developments and improvements in Blockchain including the above topics is now available.A blockchain is a distributed ledger that is replicated across multiple nodes and enables immutable, transparent and cryptographically secure record-keeping of transactions. The blockchain technology is the backbone of cryptocurrencies, and it has applications in finance, government, media and almost all other industries. Mastering Blockchain, Second Edition has been thoroughly updated and revised to provide a detailed description of this leading technology and its implementation in the real world. This book begins with the technical foundations of blockchain technology, teaching you the fundamentals of distributed systems, cryptography and how it keeps data secure. You will learn about the mechanisms behind cryptocurrencies and how to develop applications using Ethereum, a decentralized virtual machine. You will also explore different other blockchain solutions and get an introduction to business blockchain frameworks under Hyperledger, a collaborative effort for the advancement of blockchain technologies hosted by the Linux Foundation. You will also be shown how to implement blockchain solutions beyond currencies, Internet of Things with blockchain, blockchain scalability, and the future scope of this fascinating and powerful technology.

Blender Quick Start Guide. 3D Modeling, Animation, and Render with Eevee in Blender 2.8

Allan Brito

Blender is open source 3D creation software. With a long history and an enthusiastic community of users, it is the ideal choice for almost any kind of work with 3D modeling or animation. However, for new users, its power and ?exibillity can sometimes be daunting, and that’s when you need this book!The book starts by showing you round the all-new Blender 2.8 user interface. You'll look at the most commonly-used options and tools, such as navigating in 3D and selecting objects. You will then use and manipulate one of the most important windows of the interface, the 3D View.You'll learn how to use essential tools for working with 3D modeling. To give your models the feel of real-world objects, you'll learn how to create materials and set up surfaces. You'll see how to use Physically-Based Rendering (PBR), which allows you to craft realistic surfaces such as wood, stone, and metal. You will also work with Eevee, a new real-time render engine in Blender. You will see how to add motion to objects, making use of Blender's impressive 3D animation features. Finally, you'll learn how to create scenes and organize them for rendering, and later add titles and effects using built-in Blender tools.By the end of the book, you will be able to use Blender 2.8 new UI, Create 3D Models with textures, Animations, and Render them in real-time using Eevee.

Hands-On Data Science with SQL Server 2017. Perform end-to-end data analysis to gain efficient data insight

Marek Chmel, Vladimir Muzny

SQL Server is a relational database management system that enables you to cover end-to-end data science processes using various inbuilt services and features. Hands-On Data Science with SQL Server 2017 starts with an overview of data science with SQL to understand the core tasks in data science. You will learn intermediate-to-advanced level concepts to perform analytical tasks on data using SQL Server. The book has a unique approach, covering best practices, tasks, and challenges to test your abilities at the end of each chapter. You will explore the ins and outs of performing various key tasks such as data collection, cleaning, manipulation, aggregations, and filtering techniques. As you make your way through the chapters, you will turn raw data into actionable insights by wrangling and extracting data from databases using T-SQL. You will get to grips with preparing and presenting data in a meaningful way, using Power BI to reveal hidden patterns. In the concluding chapters, you will work with SQL Server integration services to transform data into a useful format and delve into advanced examples covering machine learning concepts such as predictive analytics using real-world examples.By the end of this book, you will be in a position to handle the growing amounts of data and perform everyday activities that a data science professional performs.

Software Architecture with Spring 5.0. Design and architect highly scalable, robust, and high-performance Java applications

René Enríquez, Alberto Salazar

Spring 5 and its ecosystem can be used to build robust architectures effectively. Software architecture is the underlying piece that helps us accomplish our business goals whilst supporting the features that a product demands. This book explains in detail how to choose the right architecture and apply best practices during your software development cycle to avoid technical debt and support every business requirement. Choosing the right architecture model to support your business requirements is one of the key decisions you need to take when a new product is being created from scratch or is being refactored to support new business demands. This book gives you insights into the most common architectural models and guides you when and where they can be used. During this journey, you’ll see cutting-edge technologies surrounding the Spring products, and understand how to use agile techniques such as DevOps and continuous delivery to take your software to production effectively. By the end of this book, you’ll not only know the ins and outs of Spring, but also be able to make critical design decisions that surpass your clients’ expectations.

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook. Do amazing things with the shell and automate tedious tasks - Third Edition

Clif Flynt, Sarath Lakshman, Shantanu Tushar

The shell is the most powerful tool your computer provides. Despite having it at their fingertips, many users are unaware of how much the shell can accomplish.Using the shell, you can generate databases and web pages from sets of files, automate monotonous admin tasks such as system backups, monitor your system's health and activity, identify network bottlenecks and system resource hogs, and more.This book will show you how to do all this and much more.This book, now in its third edition, describes the exciting new features in the newest Linux distributions to help you accomplish more than you imagine. It shows how to use simple commands to automate complex tasks, automate web interactions, download videos, set up containers and cloud servers, and even get free SSL certificates.Starting with the basics of the shell, you will learn simple commands and how to apply them to real-world issues. From there, you'll learn text processing, web interactions, network and system monitoring, and system tuning.Software engineers will learn how to examine system applications, how to use modern software management tools such as git and fossil for their own work, and how to submit patches to open-source projects.Finally, you'll learn how to set up Linux Containers and Virtual machines and even run your own Cloud server with a free SSL Certificate from letsencrypt.org.

Mastering pfSense. Manage, secure, and monitor your on-premise and cloud network with pfSense 2.4 - Second Edition

David Zientara

pfSense has the same reliability and stability as even the most popular commercial firewall offerings on the market – but, like the very best open-source software, it doesn’t limit you. You’re in control – you can exploit and customize pfSense around your security needs.Mastering pfSense - Second Edition, covers features that have long been part of pfSense such as captive portal, VLANs, traffic shaping, VPNs, load balancing, Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP), multi-WAN, and routing. It also covers features that have been added with the release of 2.4, such as support for ZFS partitions and OpenVPN 2.4. This book takes into account the fact that, in order to support increased cryptographic loads, pfSense version 2.5 will require a CPU that supports AES-NI. The second edition of this book places more of an emphasis on the practical side of utilizing pfSense than the previous edition, and, as a result, more examples are provided which show in step-by-step fashion how to implement many features.

Kibana 7 Quick Start Guide. Visualize your Elasticsearch data with ease

Anurag Srivastava

The Elastic Stack is growing rapidly and, day by day, additional tools are being added to make it more effective. This book endeavors to explain all the important aspects of Kibana, which is essential for utilizing its full potential.This book covers the core concepts of Kibana, with chapters set out in a coherent manner so that readers can advance their learning in a step-by-step manner. The focus is on a practical approach, thereby enabling the reader to apply those examples in real time for a better understanding of the concepts and to provide them with the correct skills in relation to the tool. With its succinct explanations, it is quite easy for a reader to use this book as a reference guide for learning basic to advanced implementations of Kibana. The practical examples, such as the creation of Kibana dashboards from CSV data, application RDBMS data, system metrics data, log file data, APM agents, and search results, can provide readers with a number of different drop-off points from where they can fetch any type of data into Kibana for the purpose of analysis or dashboarding.

Python Machine Learning By Example. The easiest way to get into machine learning

Yuxi (Hayden) Liu

Data science and machine learning are some of the top buzzwords in the technical world today. A resurging interest in machine learning is due to the same factors that have made data mining and Bayesian analysis more popular than ever. This book is your entry point to machine learning. This book starts with an introduction to machine learning and the Python language and shows you how to complete the setup. Moving ahead, you will learn all the important concepts such as, exploratory data analysis, data preprocessing, feature extraction, data visualization and clustering, classification, regression and model performance evaluation. With the help of various projects included, you will find it intriguing to acquire the mechanics of several important machine learning algorithms – they are no more obscure as they thought. Also, you will be guided step by step to build your own models from scratch. Toward the end, you will gather a broad picture of the machine learning ecosystem and best practices of applying machine learning techniques. Through this book, you will learn to tackle data-driven problems and implement your solutions with the powerful yet simple language, Python. Interesting and easy-to-follow examples, to name some, news topic classification, spam email detection, online ad click-through prediction, stock prices forecast, will keep you glued till you reach your goal.

Statistics for Machine Learning. Techniques for exploring supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning models with Python and R

Pratap Dangeti

Complex statistics in machine learning worry a lot of developers. Knowing statistics helps you build strong machine learning models that are optimized for a given problem statement.This book will teach you all it takes to perform the complex statistical computations that are required for machine learning. You will gain information on the statistics behind supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and more. You will see real-world examples that discuss the statistical side of machine learning and familiarize yourself with it. You will come across programs for performing tasks such as modeling, parameter fitting, regression, classification, density collection, working with vectors, matrices, and more.By the end of the book, you will have mastered the statistics required for machine learning and will be able to apply your new skills to any sort of industry problem.

ASP.NET Core 2 and Vue.js. Full Stack Web Development with Vue, Vuex, and ASP.NET Core 2.0

Stuart Ratcliffe

This book will walk you through the process of developing an e-commerce application from start to finish, utilizing an ASP.NET Core web API and Vue.js Single-Page Application (SPA) frontend.We will build the application using a featureslice approach, whereby in each chapter we will add the required frontend and backend changes to complete an entire feature. In the early chapters, we’ll keep things fairly simple to get you started, but by the end of the book, you’ll be utilizing some advanced concepts, such as server-side rendering and continuous integration and deployment. You will learn how to set up and configure a modern development environment for building ASP.NET Core web APIs and Vue.js SPA frontends.You will also learn about how ASP.NET Core differs from its predecessors, and how we can utilize those changes to our benefit. Finally, you will learn the fundamentals of building modern frontend applications using Vue.js, as well as some of the more advanced concepts, which can help make you more productive in your own applications in the future.

Hands-On High Performance with Spring 5. Techniques for scaling and optimizing Spring and Spring Boot applications

Chintan Mehta, Subhash Shah, Pritesh Shah, Prashant Goswami, ...

While writing an application, performance is paramount. Performance tuning for real-world applications often involves activities geared toward detecting bottlenecks. The recent release of Spring 5.0 brings major advancements in the rich API provided by the Spring framework, which means developers need to master its tools and techniques to achieve high performance applications.Hands-On High Performance with Spring 5 begins with the Spring framework's core features, exploring the integration of different Spring projects. It proceeds to evaluate various Spring specifications to identify those adversely affecting performance. You will learn about bean wiring configurations, aspect-oriented programming, database interaction, and Hibernate to focus on the metrics that help identify performance bottlenecks. You will also look at application monitoring, performance optimization, JVM internals, and garbage collection optimization. Lastly, the book will show you how to leverage the microservice architecture to build a high performance and resilient application.By the end of the book, you will have gained an insight into various techniques and solutions to build and troubleshoot high performance Spring-based applications.

VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture. Automate and orchestrate your Software-Defined Data Center on AWS

Ajit Pratap Kundan

Over the past two decades, VMware vSphere has been known as the most trusted andreliable virtualization platform. VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture shows you how to design and configure Cross Cloud Architecture by using VMware Cloud Foundation and vRealize Suite with various use cases across private, public, and hybrid Cloud. This book takes you through everything from a basic understanding of virtualization to advanced aspects of storage and network virtualization, clustering, automation, and management.This book will be your guide to designing all aspects of Cloud.We start with the challenges faced by a traditional data center, define problem statements for you, and then brief you on respective solutions. Moving on, all kinds of virtualization and Cloud offerings from AWS and IBM Soft Layer are introduced and discussed in detail. Then, you'll learn how to design IT infrastructures for new and existing applications with a combination of Cloud Foundation, vRealize Suite, and vSphere enabled with VSAN and NSX. Furthermore, you'll learn how to design and configure high availability, disaster recovery, and apply an appropriate compliance matrix.Toward the end of the book, you will learn how to calculate the TCO/ROI, along withthe VMware products packaging and licensing in detail.

Spring 5.0 Projects. Build seven web development projects with Spring MVC, Angular 6, JHipster, WebFlux, and Spring Boot 2

Nilang Patel

Spring makes it easy to create RESTful applications, merge with social services, communicate with modern databases, secure your system, and make your code modular and easy to test. With the arrival of Spring Boot, developers can really focus on the code and deliver great value, with minimal contour.This book will show you how to build various projects in Spring 5.0, using its features and third party tools. We'll start by creating a web application using Spring MVC, Spring Data, the World Bank API for some statistics on different countries, and MySQL database. Moving ahead, you'll build a RESTful web services application using Spring WebFlux framework. You'll be then taken through creating a Spring Boot-based simple blog management system, which uses Elasticsearch as the data store. Then, you'll use Spring Security with the LDAP libraries for authenticating users and create a central authentication and authorization server using OAuth 2 protocol. Further, you'll understand how to create Spring Boot-based monolithic application using JHipster. Toward the end, we'll create an online book store with microservice architecture using Spring Cloud and Net?ix OSS components, and a task management system using Spring and Kotlin.By the end of the book, you'll be able to create coherent and ?exible real-time web applications using Spring Framework.

Hands-On Cloud Development with WildFly. Develop, deploy, and configure cloud-based, enterprise Java applications with WildFly Swarm and OpenShift

The book starts by introducing you to WildFly Swarm—a tool that allows you to create runnable microservices from Java EE components. You’ll learn the basics of Swarm operation—creating microservices containing only the parts of enterprise runtime needed in a specific case. Later, you’ll learn how to configure and test those services.In order to deploy our services in the cloud, we’ll use OpenShift. You’ll get to know basic information on its architecture, features, and relationship to Docker and Kubernetes. Later, you’ll learn how to deploy and configure your services to run in the OpenShift cloud.In the last part of the book, you’ll see how to make your application production-ready. You’ll find out how to configure continuous integration for your services using Jenkins, make your application resistant to network failures using Hystrix, and how to secure them using Keycloak. By the end of the book, you’ll have a functional example application and will have practical knowledge of Java EE cloud development that can be used as a reference in your other projects.

Swift 3 Object-Oriented Programming. Implement object-oriented programming paradigms with Swift 3.0 and mix them with modern functional programming techniques to build powerful real-world applications - Second Edition

Gaston C. Hillar

Swift has quickly become one of the most-liked languages and developers’ de-facto choice when building applications that target iOS and macOS. In the new version, the Swift team wants to take its adoption to the next level by making it available for new platforms and audiences.This book introduces the object-oriented paradigm and its implementation in the Swift 3 programming language to help you understand how real-world objects can become part of fundamental reusable elements in the code. This book is developed with XCode 8.x and covers all the enhancements included in Swift 3.0. In addition, we teach you to run most of the examples with the Swift REPL available on macOS and Linux, and with a Web-based Swift sandbox developed by IBM capable of running on any web browser, including Windows and mobile devices.You will organize data in blueprints that generate instances. You’ll work with examples so you understand how to encapsulate and hide data by working with properties and access control. Then, you’ll get to grips with complex scenarios where you use instances that belong to more than one blueprint. You’ll discover the power of contract programming and parametric polymorphism. You’ll combine generic code with inheritance and multiple inheritance. Later, you’ll see how to combine functional programming with object-oriented programming and find out how to refactor your existing code for easy maintenance.

Mastering Internet of Things. Design and create your own IoT applications using Raspberry Pi 3

Peter Waher

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the fastest growing technology market. Industries are embracing IoT technologies to improve operational expenses, product life, and people's well-being. Mastering Internet of Things starts by presenting IoT fundamentals and the smart city. You will learn the important technologies and protocols that are used for the Internet of Things, their features, corresponding security implications, and practical examples on how to use them. This book focuses on creating applications and services for the Internet of Things. Further, you will learn to create applications and services for the Internet of Things. You will be discover various interesting projects and understand how to publish sensor data, control devices, and react to asynchronous events using the XMPP protocol. The book also introduces chat, to interact with your devices. You will learn how to automate your tasks by using Internet of Things Service Platforms as the base for an application. You will understand the subject of privacy, requirements they should be familiar with, and how to avoid violating any of the important new regulations being introduced.At the end of the book, you will have mastered creating open, interoperable and secure networks of things, protecting the privacy and integrity of your users and their information.