Hands-On C++ Game Animation Programming. Learn modern animation techniques from theory to implementation with C++ and OpenGL

Gabor Szauer

Animation is one of the most important parts of any game. Modern animation systems work directly with track-driven animation and provide support for advanced techniques such as inverse kinematics (IK), blend trees, and dual quaternion skinning.This book will walk you through everything you need to get an optimized, production-ready animation system up and running, and contains all the code required to build the animation system. You’ll start by learning the basic principles, and then delve into the core topics of animation programming by building a curve-based skinned animation system. You’ll implement different skinning techniques and explore advanced animation topics such as IK, animation blending, dual quaternion skinning, and crowd rendering. The animation system you will build following this book can be easily integrated into your next game development project. The book is intended to be read from start to finish, although each chapter is self-contained and can be read independently as well.By the end of this book, you’ll have implemented a modern animation system and got to grips with optimization concepts and advanced animation techniques.

Drupal 8 Configuration Management

Anja Schirwinski, Stefan Borchert

Unity Certified Programmer Exam Guide. Pass the Unity certification exam with the help of expert tips and techniques - Second Edition

Philip Walker

Unity Certified Programmer is a global certification program by Unity for anyone looking to become a professional Unity developer. The official Unity programmer exam will not only validate your Unity knowledge and skills, but will also enable you to be a part of the Unity community.This study guide will start by building on your understanding of C# programming and taking you through the process of downloading and installing Unity. You’ll understand how Unity works and get to grips with the Unity exam’s core objectives. As you advance, you’ll enhance your skills by creating an enjoyable side-scrolling shooter game that can be played within the Unity Editor or any modern Android mobile device. This Unity book will test your knowledge with self-assessment questions and help you take your skills to an advanced level by working with Unity tools such as the animator, particle effects, lighting, UI/UX, scriptable objects, and debugging.By the end of this book, you’ll have developed a solid understanding of the different tools in Unity and be able to create impressive Unity applications by making the most of its toolset.

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook. Don't neglect the shell – this book will empower you to use simple commands to perform complex tasks. Whether you're a casual or advanced Linux user, the cookbook approach makes it all so brilliantly accessible and, above all, useful. - Second Edition

Sarath Lakshman, Shantanu Tushar, Shantanu Tushar

The shell remains one of the most powerful tools on a computer system — yet a large number of users are unaware of how much one can accomplish with it. Using a combination of simple commands, we will see how to solve complex problems in day to day computer usage.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition will take you through useful real-world recipes designed to make your daily life easy when working with the shell. The book shows the reader how to effectively use the shell to accomplish complex tasks with ease.The book discusses basics of using the shell, general commands and proceeds to show the reader how to use them to perform complex tasks with ease.Starting with the basics of the shell, we will learn simple commands with their usages allowing us to perform operations on files of different kind. The book then proceeds to explain text processing, web interaction and concludes with backups, monitoring and other sysadmin tasks.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition serves as an excellent guide to solving day to day problems using the shell and few powerful commands together to create solutions.

API Analytics for Product Managers. Understand key API metrics that can help you grow your business

Deepa Goyal, Kin Lane

APIs are crucial in the modern market as they allow faster innovation. But have you ever considered your APIs as products for revenue generation?API Analytics for Product Managers takes you through the benefits of efficient researching, strategizing, marketing, and continuously measuring the effectiveness of your APIs to help grow both B2B and B2C SaaS companies. Once you've been introduced to the concept of an API as a product, this fast-paced guide will show you how to establish metrics for activation, retention, engagement, and usage of your API products, as well as metrics to measure the reach and effectiveness of documentation—an often-overlooked aspect of development.Of course, it's not all about the product—as any good product manager knows; you need to understand your customers’ needs, expectations, and satisfaction too. Once you've gathered your data, you’ll need to be able to derive actionable insights from it. This is where the book covers the advanced concepts of leading and lagging metrics, removing bias from the metric-setting process, and bringing metrics together to establish long- and short-term goals.By the end of this book, you'll be perfectly placed to apply product management methodologies to the building and scaling of revenue-generating APIs.

Heroku Cookbook. Over 70 step-by-step recipes to solve the challenges of administering and scaling a real-world production web application on Heroku

Mike Coutermarsh

ASP.NET Site Performance Secrets. Simple and proven techniques to quickly speed up your ASP.NET website

Mattijs Perdeck, Matt Perdeck

Do you think that only experts with a deep understanding of the inner workings of ASP.NET, SQL Server, and IIS can improve a website's performance? Think again – because this book tosses that notion out of the window. It will help you resolve every web developer's nightmare – a slow website – with angry managers looking over your shoulder, raging calls from advertisers and clients – the lot. You don't have the time or energy to gain a thorough and complete understanding of ASP.NET performance optimization – You just need your site to run faster! This book will show you how.This hands-on book shows how to dramatically improve the performance of your ASP.NET-based website straight away, without forcing you through a lot of theoretical learning. It teaches you practical, step-by-step techniques that you can use right away to make your site faster with just the right amount of theory you need to make sense of it all.Start reading today and you could have a faster website tomorrow.Unlike other performance-related books, here you'll first learn how to pinpoint the bottlenecks that hold back your site's performance, so you can initially focus your time and energy on those areas of your site where you can quickly make the biggest difference. It then shows you how to fix the bottlenecks you found with lots of working code samples and practical advice, and just the right amount of theoretical detail.The first chapter details techniques for diagnosing performance issues using Waterfall charts. Subsequent chapters then each focus on one individual aspect of your website, providing you with numerous real-life scenarios and performance-enhancing techniques for each of them. In the last chapter, you learn how to effectively load-test your environment in order to measure the change in performance of your site without having to update your production environment – whether it is a new release or simply a small change in the database.

Efficiency Best Practices for Microsoft 365. Discover ways to improve your efficiency and save time using M365 applications

Dr. Nitin Paranjape

Efficiency Best Practices for Microsoft 365 covers the entire range of over 25 desktop and mobile applications on the Microsoft 365 platform. This book will provide simple, immediately usable, and authoritative guidance to help you save at least 20 minutes every day, advance in your career, and achieve business growth.You'll start by covering components and tasks such as creating and storing files and then move on to data management and data analysis. As you progress through the chapters, you'll learn how to manage, monitor, and execute your tasks efficiently, focusing on creating a master task list, linking notes to meetings, and more. The book also guides you through handling projects involving many people and external contractors/agencies; you'll explore effective email communication, meeting management, and open collaboration across the organization. You'll also learn how to automate different repetitive tasks quickly and easily, even if you’re not a programmer, transforming the way you import, clean, and analyze data.By the end of this Microsoft 365 book, you'll have gained the skills you need to improve efficiency with the help of expert tips and techniques for using M365 apps.

Architecting AWS with Terraform. Design resilient and secure Cloud Infrastructures with Terraform on Amazon Web Services

Erol Kavas

Infrastructure as code (IaC) and Terraform have become essential tools for managing cloud infrastructure and automating deployment processes. Mastering Terraform on AWS presents a step-by-step approach on how to master these tools and build a secure and scalable AWS infrastructure. The book starts with an introduction to patterns and anti-patterns of IaC and Terraform, explaining the common mistakes and pitfalls you must avoid. You’ll then learn about the importance of planning and designing infrastructure projects in AWS and making informed decisions for projects in AWS Terraform. You’ll find out how to implement Terraform in your projects and deploy serverless projects. Next, you’ll be able to deploy containers in AWS with Terraform, exploring the best practices for Terraform IaC projects. You’ll understand how you can leverage Terraform for enterprises, build Git workflows for IaC and Terraform projects, and automate deployment of Terraform projects. The last set of chapters will teach you how to govern AWS with Terraform and build a secure infrastructure. Finally, you’ll discover how to achieve a perfect AWS infrastructure with Terraform. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a comprehensive understanding of the various aspects of Terraform and IaC, along with the knowledge required to build, manage, and deploy complex infrastructures on AWS.

The Art of Manufacturing. Overcome control challenges for increasing efficiency in manufacturing using real-world examples

Ninad Deshpande, Sivaram Pothukuchi

Engineering disciplines focus mainly on programming control systems, while the challenges they overcome or their industry applications largely go uncovered, leaving a huge gap between the theory and industry practices. This leads to engineers learning about subjects without actually understanding their purpose and entering the industry needing months of training.The Art of Manufacturing cuts across pedantic theory and reaches practical applications. You’ll begin your learning journey by starting from the product and moving backward to the manufacturing landscape, factories, machines, and finally to the automation and control challenges faced in manufacturing. The book builds on the authors’ valuable on-field experience, providing a detailed view of the manufacturing of real-world products, while simultaneously providing various analogies and references to daily tasks. As you advance through the chapters, you’ll work on interesting control problems and find out how to overcome them in applications. The concluding chapters offer you a sneak peek into the future of automation and factories.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to relate a real-world product with an associated control challenge and discover ways to overcome these challenges.

Efficient Accounting with Xero. The definitive guide to optimizing your accounting with proven techniques and best practices

Jay Kimelman, Liz Mason

Xero empowers business owners to gain insights into their business and performance and collaborate seamlessly with their accountants and tax professionals. This book goes beyond the basics and explores the more advanced Xero features, techniques, and best practices for managing sales taxes, budgeting, and reporting.You’ll begin by diving right into Xero, setting up a bank feed, and exploring its power while experiencing just how easy it is to use. The book will guide you in setting up Xero the right way to ensure that you succeed in each of your transactions. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll learn what spend money and receive money transactions are and be able to easily send invoices and collect receivables or payments, collect and pay bills, and even track your business assets with Xero. Toward the end, you’ll be proficient at producing powerful reports, giving you the keys to running or advising any business.By the end of this Xero book, you’ll have gained the confidence to add a company to Xero, set up the bank feeds, reconcile the transactions, send invoices, and pay bills, ending up with beautiful financial statements.

Building Data Science Solutions with Anaconda. A comprehensive starter guide to building robust and complete models

Dan Meador, Kevin Goldsmith

You might already know that there's a wealth of data science and machine learning resources available on the market, but what you might not know is how much is left out by most of these AI resources. This book not only covers everything you need to know about algorithm families but also ensures that you become an expert in everything, from the critical aspects of avoiding bias in data to model interpretability, which have now become must-have skills.In this book, you'll learn how using Anaconda as the easy button, can give you a complete view of the capabilities of tools such as conda, which includes how to specify new channels to pull in any package you want as well as discovering new open source tools at your disposal. You’ll also get a clear picture of how to evaluate which model to train and identify when they have become unusable due to drift. Finally, you’ll learn about the powerful yet simple techniques that you can use to explain how your model works.By the end of this book, you’ll feel confident using conda and Anaconda Navigator to manage dependencies and gain a thorough understanding of the end-to-end data science workflow.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Enterprise Edition - Financial Management. Maximize your business productivity through modern financial management in Dynamics 365 - Third Edition

Mohamed Aamer Ala El Din

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for finance and operations is a rapidly growing application and is widely used in enterprise organizations. Because of its ability to maximize business productivity, it is a fast-growing business application package in the ERP market.We will start by looking into ERP concepts, implementation needs, and interface design, giving you basic knowledge of financial management aspects and explaining key concepts along the way. To begin with, you'll be taken through the general ledger and financial dimension functions. You'll later learn about the sales tax mechanism and multi-currency in Microsoft Dynamics 365. We tackle each topic with focused examples and explanations on topics such as payable/receivable accounts, forecasting, cash and bank management, budgeting planning/control, and fixed assets. Finally, we walk you through intercompany, consolidation, costing basics, and financial reporting.By the end of this book, your finance team will have a much richer understanding of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for finance and operations and its powerful capabilities.

The Road to Azure Cost Governance. Techniques to tame your monthly Azure bill with a continuous optimization journey for your apps

Paola E. Annis, Giuliano Caglio, Marco Barra Caracciolo

Cloud teams and ICT cost controllers working with Azure will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide, introducing a process model for structured cost governance. The Road to Azure Cost Governance is a must-read if you find yourself facing the harsh reality of monthly cloud costs gradually getting out of control.Starting with how resources are created and managed, everything you need to know in order to track, display, optimize, rightsize, and clean up cloud resources will be tackled with a workflow approach that will leave the choice of operation to you (be it the Azure CLI, automation, logic apps, or even custom code). Using real-world datasets, you'll learn everything from basic cost management to modeling your cloud spend across your technical resources in a sustainable way. The book will also show you how to create a recursive optimization process that will give you full control of spending and savings, while helping you reserve budget for future cloud projects and innovation.By the end of this Azure book, you'll have a clear understanding and control of your cloud spend along with knowledge of a number of cost-saving techniques used by companies around the world, application optimization patterns, and the carbon impact of your cloud infrastructure.

Architecting and Building High-Speed SoCs. Design, develop, and debug complex FPGA based systems-on-chip

Mounir Maaref

Modern and complex SoCs can adapt to many demanding system requirements by combining the processing power of ARM processors and the feature-rich Xilinx FPGAs. You’ll need to understand many protocols, use a variety of internal and external interfaces, pinpoint the bottlenecks, and define the architecture of an SoC in an FPGA to produce a superior solution in a timely and cost-efficient manner.This book adopts a practical approach to helping you master both the hardware and software design flows, understand key interconnects and interfaces, analyze the system performance and enhance it using the acceleration techniques, and finally build an RTOS-based software application for an advanced SoC design. You’ll start with an introduction to the FPGA SoCs technology fundamentals and their associated development design tools. Gradually, the book will guide you through building the SoC hardware and software, starting from the architecture definition to testing on a demo board or a virtual platform. The level of complexity evolves as the book progresses and covers advanced applications such as communications, security, and coherent hardware acceleration.By the end of this book, you'll have learned the concepts underlying FPGA SoCs’ advanced features and you’ll have constructed a high-speed SoC targeting a high-end FPGA from the ground up.

Scalable Data Architecture with Java. Build efficient enterprise-grade data architecting solutions using Java

Sinchan Banerjee

Java architectural patterns and tools help architects to build reliable, scalable, and secure data engineering solutions that collect, manipulate, and publish data.This book will help you make the most of the architecting data solutions available with clear and actionable advice from an expert.You’ll start with an overview of data architecture, exploring responsibilities of a Java data architect, and learning about various data formats, data storage, databases, and data application platforms as well as how to choose them. Next, you’ll understand how to architect a batch and real-time data processing pipeline. You’ll also get to grips with the various Java data processing patterns, before progressing to data security and governance. The later chapters will show you how to publish Data as a Service and how you can architect it. Finally, you’ll focus on how to evaluate and recommend an architecture by developing performance benchmarks, estimations, and various decision metrics.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to successfully orchestrate data architecture solutions using Java and related technologies as well as to evaluate and present the most suitable solution to your clients.