Apache Spark Quick Start Guide. Quickly learn the art of writing efficient big data applications with Apache Spark

Shrey Mehrotra, Akash Grade

Apache Spark is a ?exible framework that allows processing of batch and real-time data. Its unified engine has made it quite popular for big data use cases. This book will help you to get started with Apache Spark 2.0 and write big data applications for a variety of use cases.It will also introduce you to Apache Spark – one of the most popular Big Data processing frameworks. Although this book is intended to help you get started with Apache Spark, but it also focuses on explaining the core concepts. This practical guide provides a quick start to the Spark 2.0 architecture and its components. It teaches you how to set up Spark on your local machine. As we move ahead, you will be introduced to resilient distributed datasets (RDDs) and DataFrame APIs, and their corresponding transformations and actions. Then, we move on to the life cycle of a Spark application and learn about the techniques used to debug slow-running applications. You will also go through Spark’s built-in modules for SQL, streaming, machine learning, and graph analysis.Finally, the book will lay out the best practices and optimization techniques that are key for writing efficient Spark applications. By the end of this book, you will have a sound fundamental understanding of the Apache Spark framework and you will be able to write and optimize Spark applications.

TensorFlow: Powerful Predictive Analytics with TensorFlow. Predict valuable insights of your data with TensorFlow

Md. Rezaul Karim

Predictive analytics discovers hidden patterns from structured and unstructured data for automated decision making in business intelligence. Predictive decisions are becoming a huge trend worldwide, catering to wide industry sectors by predicting which decisions are more likely to give maximum results. TensorFlow, Google’s brainchild, is immensely popular and extensively used for predictive analysis.This book is a quick learning guide on all the three types of machine learning, that is, supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning with TensorFlow. This book will teach you predictive analytics for high-dimensional and sequence data. In particular, you will learn the linear regression model for regression analysis. You will also learn how to use regression for predicting continuous values. You will learn supervised learning algorithms for predictive analytics. You will explore unsupervised learning and clustering using K-meansYou will then learn how to predict neighborhoods using K-means, and then, see another example of clustering audio clips based on their audio features. This book is ideal for developers, data analysts, machine learning practitioners, and deep learning enthusiasts who want to build powerful, robust, and accurate predictive models with the power of TensorFlow. This book is embedded with useful assessments that will help you revise the concepts you have learned in this book. This book is repurposed for this specific learning experience from material from Packt's Predictive Analytics with TensorFlow by Md. Rezaul Karim.

Redux Quick Start Guide. A beginner's guide to managing app state with Redux

James Lee, Tao Wei, Suresh Kumar Mukhiya

Starting with a detailed overview of Redux, we will follow the test-driven development (TDD) approach to develop single-page applications. We will set up JEST for testing and use JEST to test React, Redux, Redux-Sage, Reducers, and other components. We will then add important middleware and set up immutableJS in our application. We will use common data structures such as Map, List, Set, and OrderedList from the immutableJS framework. We will then add user interfaces using ReactJS, Redux-Form, and Ant Design.We will explore the use of react-router-dom and its functions. We will create a list of routes that we will need in order to create our application, and explore routing on the server site and create the required routes for our application. We will then debug our application and integrate Redux Dev tools.We will then set up our API server and create the API required for our application. We will dive into a modern approach to structuring our server site components in terms of Model, Controller, Helper functions, and utilities functions. We will explore the use of NodeJS with Express to build the REST API components. Finally, we will venture into the possibilities of extending the application for further research, including deployment and optimization.

Learning Windows Server Containers. Build and deploy high-quality portable apps faster

Srikanth Machiraju

Windows Server Containers are independent, isolated, manageable and portable application environments which are light weight and shippable. Decomposing your application into smaller manageable components or MicroServices helps in building scalable and distributed application environments. Windows Server Containers have a significant impact on application developers, development operations (DevOps) and infrastructure management teams. Applications can be built, shipped and deployed in a fast-paced manner on an easily manageable and updatable environment.Learning Windows Server Containers teaches you to build simple to advanced production grade container based application using Asp.Net Core, Visual Studio, Azure, Docker and PowerShell technologies. The book teaches you to build and deploy simple web applications as Windows and Hyper-V containers on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 on Azure. You will learn to build on top of Windows Container Base OS Images, integrate with existing images from Docker Hub, create custom images and publish to Hub. You will also learn to work with storage containers built using Volumes and SQL Server as container, create and configure custom networks, integrate with Redis Cache containers, configure continuous integration and deployment pipelines using VSTS and Git Repository. Further you can also learn to manage resources for a container, setting up monitoring and diagnostics, deploy composite container environments using Docker Compose on Windows and manage container clusters using Docker Swarm. The last chapter of the book focuses on building applications using Microsoft’s new and thinnest server platform – Nano Servers.

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.

Java 9: Building Robust Modular Applications. Master advanced Java features and implement them to build amazing projects

Dr. Edward Lavieri, Peter Verhas, Jason Lee

Java 9 and its new features add to the richness of the language; Java is one of the languages most used by developers to build robust software applications. Java 9 comes with a special emphasis on modularity with its integration with Jigsaw. This course is your one-stop guide to mastering the language.You'll be provided with an overview and explanation of the new features introduced in Java 9 and the importance of the new APIs and enhancements. Some new features of Java 9 are ground-breaking; if you are an experienced programmer, you will be able to make your enterprise applications leaner by learning these new features. You'll be provided with practical guidance in applying your newly acquired knowledge of Java 9 and further information on future developments of the Java platform. This course will improve your productivity, making your applications faster. Next, you'll go on to implement everything you've learned by building 10 cool projects. You will learn to build an email filter that separates spam messages from all your inboxes, a social media aggregator app that will help you efficiently track various feeds, and a microservice for a client/server note application, to name just a few.By the end of this course, you will be well acquainted with Java 9 features and able to build your own applications and projects.This Learning Path contains the best content from the following two recently published Packt products:• Mastering Java 9• Java 9 Programming Blueprints

Hands-On Deep Learning for Images with TensorFlow. Build intelligent computer vision applications using TensorFlow and Keras

Will Ballard

TensorFlow is Google’s popular offering for machine learning and deep learning, quickly becoming a favorite tool for performing fast, efficient, and accurate deep learning tasks.Hands-On Deep Learning for Images with TensorFlow shows you the practical implementations of real-world projects, teaching you how to leverage TensorFlow’s capabilities to perform efficient image processing using the power of deep learning. With the help of this book, you will get to grips with the different paradigms of performing deep learning such as deep neural nets and convolutional neural networks, followed by understanding how they can be implemented using TensorFlow.By the end of this book, you will have mastered all the concepts of deep learning and their implementation with TensorFlow and Keras.

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.

Deep Learning with Keras. Implementing deep learning models and neural networks with the power of Python

Antonio Gulli, Sujit Pal

This book starts by introducing you to supervised learning algorithms such as simple linear regression, the classical multilayer perceptron and more sophisticated deep convolutional networks. You will also explore image processing with recognition of handwritten digit images, classification of images into different categories, and advanced objects recognition with related image annotations. An example of identification of salient points for face detection is also provided.Next you will be introduced to Recurrent Networks, which are optimized for processing sequence data such as text, audio or time series. Following that, you will learn about unsupervised learning algorithms such as Autoencoders and the very popular Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). You will also explore non-traditional uses of neural networks as Style Transfer.Finally, you will look at reinforcement learning and its application to AI game playing, another popular direction of research and application of neural networks.

Hands-On Automation Testing with Java for Beginners. Build automation testing frameworks from scratch with Java

Rahul Shetty

Java is one of the most commonly-used software languages by programmers and developers. Are you from a non-technical background and looking to master Java for your automation needs? Then Hands-On Automation Testing with Java for Beginners is for you.This book provides you with efficient techniques to effectively handle Java-related automation projects. You will learn how to handle strings and their functions in Java. As you make your way through the book, you will get to grips with classes and objects, along with their uses. In the concluding chapters, you will learn about the importance of inheritance and exceptions with practical examples. By the end of this book, you will have gained comprehensive knowledge of Java.

Hands-On UX Design for Developers. Design, prototype, and implement compelling user experiences from scratch

Elvis Canziba

Designing user experience (UX) is one of the most important aspects of a project, as it has a direct effect on how customers think of your company. The process of designing a user experience is one of the most challenging yet rewarding aspects of product development. Hands-On UX Design for Developers will teach you how to create amazing user experiences for products from scratch.This book starts with helping you understand the importance of a good UX design and the role of a UX designer. It will take you through the different stages of designing a UX and the application of various principles of psychology in UX design. Next, you will learn how to conduct user research and market research, which is crucial to creating a great UX. You will also learn how to create user personas and use it for testing. This book will help you gain the ability to think like a UX designer and understand both sides of product development: design and coding. You will explore the latest tools, such as Sketch, Balsamiq, and Framer.js, to create wireframes and prototypes. The concluding chapters will take you through designing your UI, dealing with big data while designing a UX, and the fundamentals of frontend. Finally, you'll prepare your portfolio and become job ready in the UX arena.

Godot Engine Game Development Projects. Build five cross-platform 2D and 3D games with Godot 3.0

Chris Bradfield

Godot Engine Game Development Projects is an introduction to the Godot game engine and its new 3.0 version. Godot 3.0 brings a large number of new features and capabilities that make it a strong alternative to expensive commercial game engines. For beginners, Godot offers a friendly way to learn game development techniques, while for experienced developers it is a powerful, customizable tool that can bring your visions to life.This book consists of five projects that will help developers achieve a sound understanding of the engine when it comes to building games.Game development is complex and involves a wide spectrum of knowledge and skills. This book can help you build on your foundation level skills by showing you how to create a number of small-scale game projects. Along the way, you will learn how Godot works and discover important game development techniques that you can apply to your projects.Using a straightforward, step-by-step approach and practical examples, the book will take you from the absolute basics through to sophisticated game physics, animations, and other techniques. Upon completing the final project, you will have a strong foundation for future success with Godot 3.0.

Hands-On Cybersecurity for Finance. Identify vulnerabilities and secure your financial services from security breaches

Dr. Erdal Ozkaya, Milad Aslaner

Organizations have always been a target of cybercrime. Hands-On Cybersecurity for Finance teaches you how to successfully defend your system against common cyber threats, making sure your financial services are a step ahead in terms of security.The book begins by providing an overall description of cybersecurity, guiding you through some of the most important services and technologies currently at risk from cyber threats. Once you have familiarized yourself with the topic, you will explore specific technologies and threats based on case studies and real-life scenarios. As you progress through the chapters, you will discover vulnerabilities and bugs (including the human risk factor), gaining an expert-level view of the most recent threats. You'll then explore information on how you can achieve data and infrastructure protection. In the concluding chapters, you will cover recent and significant updates to procedures and configurations, accompanied by important details related to cybersecurity research and development in IT-based financial services.By the end of the book, you will have gained a basic understanding of the future of information security and will be able to protect financial services and their related infrastructures.

Mastering Numerical Computing with NumPy. Master scientific computing and perform complex operations with ease

Umit Mert Cakmak, Mert Cuhadaroglu

NumPy is one of the most important scientific computing libraries available for Python. Mastering Numerical Computing with NumPy teaches you how to achieve expert level competency to perform complex operations, with in-depth coverage of advanced concepts.Beginning with NumPy's arrays and functions, you will familiarize yourself with linear algebra concepts to perform vector and matrix math operations. You will thoroughly understand and practice data processing, exploratory data analysis (EDA), and predictive modeling. You will then move on to working on practical examples which will teach you how to use NumPy statistics in order to explore US housing data and develop a predictive model using simple and multiple linear regression techniques. Once you have got to grips with the basics, you will explore unsupervised learning and clustering algorithms, followed by understanding how to write better NumPy code while keeping advanced considerations in mind. The book also demonstrates the use of different high-performance numerical computing libraries and their relationship with NumPy. You will study how to benchmark the performance of different configurations and choose the best for your system.By the end of this book, you will have become an expert in handling and performing complex data manipulations.

Switching to Angular. Align with Google's long-term vision for Angular version 5 and beyond - Third Edition

Minko Gechev

Align your work to stable APIs of Angular, version 5 and beyond, with Angular expert Minko Gechev. Angular is the modern Google framework for you to build high-performance, SEO-friendly, and robust web applications. Switching to Angular, Third Edition, shows you how you can align your current and future development with Google's long-term vision for Angular. Gechev shares his expert knowledge and community involvement to give you the clarity you need to confidently switch to Angular and stable APIs. Minko Gechev helps you get to grips with Angular with an overview of the framework, and understand the long-term building blocks of Google's web framework. Gechev then gives you the lowdown on TypeScript with a crash course, so you can take advantage of Angular in its native, statically typed environment. You'll next move on to see how to use Angular dependency injection, plus how Angular router and forms, and Angular pipes, are designed to work for your projects today and in the future.You'll be aligned with the vision and techniques of the one Angular, and be ready to start building quick and efficient Angular applications. You'll know how to take advantage of the latest Angular features and the core, stable APIs you can depend on. You'll be ready to confidently plan your future with the Angular framework.

Building Microservices with Go. Develop seamless, efficient, and robust microservices with Go

Nic Jackson

Microservice architecture is sweeping the world as the de facto pattern to build web-based applications. Golang is a language particularly well suited to building them. Its strong community, encouragement of idiomatic style, and statically-linked binary artifacts make integrating it with other technologies and managing microservices at scale consistent and intuitive. This book will teach you the common patterns and practices, showing you how to apply these using the Go programming language.It will teach you the fundamental concepts of architectural design and RESTful communication, and show you patterns that provide manageable code that is supportable in development and at scale in production. We will provide you with examples on how to put these concepts and patterns into practice with Go. Whether you are planning a new application or working in an existing monolith, this book will explain and illustrate with practical examples how teams of all sizes can start solving problems with microservices. It will help you understand Docker and Docker-Compose and how it can be used to isolate microservice dependencies and build environments. We finish off by showing you various techniques to monitor, test, and secure your microservices. By the end, you will know the benefits of system resilience of a microservice and the advantages of Go stack.