OpenSceneGraph 3.0: Beginner's Guide. This book is a concise introduction to the main features of OpenSceneGraph which then leads you into the fundamentals of developing virtual reality applications. Practical instructions and explanations accompany you every step of the way

Xuelei Qian, Rui Wang, Robert Osfield

Virtual reality has quite a lot of demand in computer science today and OpenSceneGraph, being one of the best 3D graphics toolkits, is being used widely. Although you can use the powerful OpenSceneGraph, based on the low-level OpenGL API, to implement virtual-reality applications that simulate different environments in the 3D world, developing picture-perfect applications is easier said than done.This book has been written with the goal of helping readers become familiar with the structure and main functionalities of OpenSceneGraph (OSG), and guide them to develop virtual-reality applications using this powerful 3D graphics engine. This book covers the essence of OpenSceneGraph (OSG), providing programmers with detailed explanations and examples of scene graph APIs.This book helps you take full advantages of the key features and functionalities of OpenSceneGraph (OSG). You will learn almost all of the core elements required in a virtual reality application, including memory management, geometry creation, the structure of the scene graph, realistic rendering effects, scene navigation, animation, interaction with input devices and external user interfaces, file reading and writing, and so on.With the essential knowledge contained in this book, you will be able to start using OSG in your own projects and research fields, and extend its functionalities by referring to OSG's source code, official examples and API documentation.This handy book divides the core functionalities of the proved and comprehensive OpenSceneGraph (OSG) 3D graphics engine into different aspects, which are introduced in separate chapters. Each chapter can be treated as an individual part that covers one important field of OSG programming, along with several examples illustrating concrete usages and solutions. But the sequence of chapters is also organized from the easy to the more difficult, to help you get to grips with OSG.By the end of the whole book, you will have gained a ready-to-use OSG development environment for yourself and have the general ability to develop OSG-based applications and extend practical functionalities for your own purposes.

Learning PrimeFaces Extensions Development. This book covers all the knowledge you need to start developing extended or advanced PrimeFaces applications. With lots of screenshots and a clear step-by-step approach, it makes learning an enjoyable process

Sudheer Jonna

Smart Robotics with LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor. Learn to play with the LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor kit and build creative robots

Aaron Maurer

LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor is the latest addition to the LEGO MINDSTORMS theme. It features unique designs that you can use to build robots, and also enable you to perform activities using the robot inventor application.You'll begin by exploring the history of LEGO MINDSTORMS, and then delve into various elements of the Inventor kit. Moving on, you'll start working on different projects which will prepare you to build a variety of smart robots. The first robotic project involves designing a claw to grab objects, and helps you to explore how a smart robot is used in everyday life and in industry. The second project revolves around building a working guitar that can be played and modified to meet the needs of the user. As you advance, you'll explore the concept of biomimicry as you discover how to build a scorpion robot. In addition to this, you'll also work on a classic robotic challenge by building a sumobot. Throughout the book, you'll come across a variety of projects that will provide you with hands-on experience in building creative robots, such as building a Dragster, Egg Decorator, and Plankton from Spongebob Squarepants.By the end of this LEGO book, you'll have got to grips with the concepts behind building a robot, and also found creative ways to integrate them using the application based on your creative insights and ideas.

Intelligent Workloads at the Edge. Deliver cyber-physical outcomes with data and machine learning using AWS IoT Greengrass

Indraneel Mitra, Ryan Burke

The Internet of Things (IoT) has transformed how people think about and interact with the world. The ubiquitous deployment of sensors around us makes it possible to study the world at any level of accuracy and enable data-driven decision-making anywhere. Data analytics and machine learning (ML) powered by elastic cloud computing have accelerated our ability to understand and analyze the huge amount of data generated by IoT. Now, edge computing has brought information technologies closer to the data source to lower latency and reduce costs.This book will teach you how to combine the technologies of edge computing, data analytics, and ML to deliver next-generation cyber-physical outcomes. You’ll begin by discovering how to create software applications that run on edge devices with AWS IoT Greengrass. As you advance, you’ll learn how to process and stream IoT data from the edge to the cloud and use it to train ML models using Amazon SageMaker. The book also shows you how to train these models and run them at the edge for optimized performance, cost savings, and data compliance.By the end of this IoT book, you’ll be able to scope your own IoT workloads, bring the power of ML to the edge, and operate those workloads in a production setting.

Joomla! with Flash. Build a stunning, content-rich, and interactive web site with Joomla! 1.5 and Flash CS4

Suhreed Sarkar, Chris Davenport

You can build any kind of web site using Joomla! The look and feel of Joomla! web sites can largely be customized using the many templates, components, modules and plug-ins available. With all these features, ease of administration, and options for customization, sometimes you may think of integrating other technologies such as Flash with it. This is because Flash provides great animation features that are otherwise not available in Joomla!This book shows how to integrate Flash into Joomla! You will learn how to add the various functionalities provided by Flash and make your site stunning, visually rich, and interactive. The book covers topics like flash headers, menus, displaying and maintaining flash movies, slide shows, animation, interactivity, and more. Installation and use of Joomla! modules like Flash, Joomla Random Flash, Active, and Handy SWF Flash module are covered too.The book introduces Joomla! and Flash and briefly shows the benefits of using Flash in Joomla!. It shows you how to add Flash objects in Joomla! articles and modules, build Flash-based menus, create Flash-based photo galleries, interactive maps, and charts. It also shows you how to display content in custom fonts, create a streaming media site, customize the Joomla! template to display Flash logos, headers and banners, and use Joomla! content in Flash objects. Finally the book covers troubleshooting Joomla! and its extensions. At the end of the book an appendix lists resources on Joomla!, Flash, and related extensions, to help you find more information.

Growth Product Manager's Handbook. Winning strategies and frameworks for driving user acquisition, retention, and optimizing metrics

Eve Chen

In the dynamic landscape of modern product management, professionals face a myriad of challenges, spanning customer acquisition, monetization, user retention, competition, and technical expertise. To overcome these hurdles, this book crystalizes growth strategies that revolve around harnessing the power of data, experimentation, and user insights to drive growth for a product.This handbook serves as your guide to exploring the essential growth product management models and their applications in various contexts, unveiling their role in enhancing revenue performance and customer retention. Along the way, actionable steps will steer you in implementing these models while helping you better understand your users, experiment with new features and marketing strategies, and measure the impact of your efforts, ultimately guiding you to achieve your customer retention and lifetime customer goals.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained advanced insights into growth product management, models, and growth strategies, and when and how to use them to achieve customer-for-life goals and optimized revenue performance.

VMware vCloud Director Cookbook. Over 80 recipes to help you master VMware vCloud Director

Daniel Langenhan

VMware vCloud Director is an enterprise software solution that enables the building of secure, private clouds by pooling together infrastructure resources into virtual data centers. The tool enables self-service via a web interface to reduce the management overhead and offers amazing possibilities for production and development environments. Thus, the tool will ensure efficient management of resources with data center efficiency and business agility.VMWare VCloud Director Cookbook will cover a lot of ground, ranging from easy to complex recipes. It will not only dive into networks, data-stores, and vApps, but also cover vCloud design improvements, troubleshooting, and the vCloud API.VMWare VCloud Director Cookbook is split into different sections, each of which deals with a special topic in vCloud - from networks, to vApps, to storage and design. This book contains over 80 recipes with the difficulty levels ranging from simple to very advanced. You will learn how to automate vCloud easily and quickly with the API, and also learn how to isolate a vApp and still fully access it without risking the network. Design considerations that need to be addressed while deploying the vCloud and more will also be looked into.VMWare VCloud Director Cookbook will make your life as an admin a lot easier by providing you with some good recipes that have been proven to work in small to large enterprises.

Appium Essentials. Explore mobile automation with Appium and discover new ways to test native, web, and hybrid applications

Jonathan Lipps, Manoj Hans, Shashikant Jagtap

PrimeFaces Beginner's Guide. The perfect introduction to PrimeFaces, this tutorial will take you step by step through all the great features, ranging from form-creation to sophisticated navigation systems. All you need are some basic JSF and jQuery skills

K. Siva Prasad Reddy, Siva Prasad Reddy Katamreddy

PrimeFaces is a lightweight UI component framework for JSF based applications. PrimeFaces is very easy to use because it comes as a single JAR file and requires no mandatory XML configuration. It provides more than 100 UI Components and an in-built AJAX support. It also provides theme support for UI components with more than 30 themes out-of-the-box. With PrimeFaces, developers can create rich user interfaces very easily.PrimeFaces Beginners Guide is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with clear step-by-step exercises,that will help you to learn and explore the features of PrimeFaces.PrimeFaces Beginners Guide starts by showing you how to install PrimeFaces, create sample forms, and perform validations and then looks at various commonly used PrimeFaces utility components. Next, you will look into various basic text input components like form controls, Calendar, AutoComplete, and Rich Text Editor. Then you will learn about advanced UI components such as DataTables, panels, menus,and charts. Throughout the chapters we will be building a sample web application using PrimeFaces progressively that will give you a hands-on experience on using PrimeFaces effectively.You will learn how to create complex layouts using accordion panels, tab views, sophisticated menu navigations, breadcrumbs and much more. You will also learn how to display data using DataTable with pagination, filters, and lazy loading, and how to export data to Excel or PDF features. You will learn how to represent data in various formats like trees, charts, and TagCloud. You will also learn how to build an application supporting multiple themes.With this PrimeFaces Beginner's Guide , you will learn how to use PrimeFaces easily and effectively.

Extending Puppet. Tools and Techniques for smarter infrastructure configuration - Second Edition

Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor

Puppet has changed the way we manage our systems, but Puppet itself is changing and evolving, and so are the ways we are using it. To tackle our IT infrastructure challenges and avoid common errors when designing our architectures, an up-to-date, practical, and focused view of the current and future Puppet evolution is what we need. With Puppet, you define the state of your IT infrastructure, and it automatically enforces the desired state.This book will be your guide to designing and deploying your Puppet architecture. It will help you utilize Puppet to manage your IT infrastructure. Get to grips with Hiera and learn how to install and configure it, before learning best practices for writing reusable and maintainable code. You will also be able to explore the latest features of Puppet 4, before executing, testing, and deploying Puppet across your systems. As you progress, Extending Puppet takes you through higher abstraction modules, along with tips for effective code workflow management.Finally, you will learn how to develop plugins for Puppet - as well as some useful techniques that can help you to avoid common errors and overcome everyday challenges.

IBM Rational Team Concert 2 Essentials. Improve your team productivity with Integrated Process, Planning, and Collaboration using Team Concert Enterprise Edition

T C Fenstermaker, TC Fenstermaker, Suresh Krishna, Suresh Madhuvarsu

Software development is a collaborative effort needing active and timely input and response from all its members. Every day, project managers face ever-increasing pressures to produce high-quality software with increasing constraints. With IBM's Rational Team Concert collaborative software delivery environment, you can tremendously improve the productivity of your entire team through a web-based user-interface, continuous builds, a customizable process with work support, team support, integration and many more features.Written by Suresh Krishna and TC Fenstermaker, experts on Rational Team Concert, this book will help you leverage the full potential of the IBM Rational Team Concert platform to improve your individual and team performance. It follows a realistic case-study example enabling you to learn about Rational Team Concert fundamentals and best practices along the way to efficiently manage your software projects and tackle various software development challenges.Beginning with an in-depth analysis of software development challenges, the book goes on to introduce the Jazz Platform followed by a complete overview of the architecture of Rational Team Concert. After you install Rational Team Concert on WebSphere and learn to configure the server and clients, you will see all the features in relation to Web and Eclipse clients.From Chapter 3 onwards a realistic sample application is constructed to give you a strong grasp of your concepts. As you proceed, you learn source control, the mechanism to create, control, and manage documents, artifacts in a software development lifecycle, followed by different tools that Rational Team Concert offers for effective team and work management. You tackle the various challenges of Team Collaboration by integrated e-mail, instant messaging, events, feeds, and work items, the basic units of the task. You also learn the various aspects of the software development process and release planning along with process templates, which provide the initial process and iteration of your project. Finally, you extend the Rational Team Concert and make use of the Jazz Platform APIs to customize your process to fit your organizational needs.

Live Longer with AI. How artificial intelligence is helping us extend our healthspan and live better too

Tina Woods, Andrew Scott

Live Longer with AI examines how the latest cutting-edge developments are helping us to live longer, healthier and better too. It compels us to stop thinking that health is about treating disease and start regarding it as our greatest personal and societal asset to protect.The book discusses the impact that AI has on understanding the cellular basis of aging and how our genes are influenced by our environment – with the pandemic highlighting the interconnectedness of human and planetary health.Author Tina Woods, founder and CEO of Collider Health and Collider Science, and the co-founder of Longevity International, has curated a panel of deeply insightful interviews with some of today’s brightest and most innovative thought leaders at the crossroads of health, technology and society. Read what leading experts in health and technology are saying about the book:This is a handbook for the revolution!—Sir Muir Gray, Director, Optimal AgeingYou can live longer and be happier if you make some changes – that isthe theme of this book. Well-written and compelling.—Ben Page, CEO, Ipsos MoriTina's book is a must-read for those who want to discover the future of health.—José Luis Cordeiro, Fellow, World Academy of Art & Science;Director, The Millennium Project; Vice Chair, Humanity Plus; Co-Author of The Death of DeathAbout the consultant editorMelissa Ream is a leading health and care strategist in the UK, leveraging user-driven design and artificial intelligence to design systems and support people to live healthier, longer lives.

Learning F# Functional Data Structures and Algorithms. Get started with F# and explore functional programming paradigm with data structures and algorithms

Adnan Masood

Multimedia Programming Using Max/MSP and TouchDesigner. Design, build, and refine immersive audio-visual apps and performance environments

Patrik Lechner

Max 6 and TouchDesigner are both high-level visual programming languages based on the metaphor of connecting computational objects with patch cords. This guide will teach you how to design and build high-quality audio-visual systems in Max 6 and TouchDesigner, giving you competence in both designing and using these real-time systems. In the first few chapters, you will learn the basics of designing tools to generate audio-visual experiences through easy-to-follow instructions aimed at beginners and intermediate. Then, we combine tools such as Gen, Jitter, and TouchDesigner to work along with Max 6 to create 2D and 3D visualizations, this book provides you with tutorials based on creating generative art synchronized to audio. By the end of the book, you will be able to design and structure highly interactive, real-time systems.

Azure Databricks Cookbook. Accelerate and scale real-time analytics solutions using the Apache Spark-based analytics service

Phani Raj, Vinod Jaiswal

Azure Databricks is a unified collaborative platform for performing scalable analytics in an interactive environment. The Azure Databricks Cookbook provides recipes to get hands-on with the analytics process, including ingesting data from various batch and streaming sources and building a modern data warehouse.The book starts by teaching you how to create an Azure Databricks instance within the Azure portal, Azure CLI, and ARM templates. You’ll work through clusters in Databricks and explore recipes for ingesting data from sources, including files, databases, and streaming sources such as Apache Kafka and EventHub. The book will help you explore all the features supported by Azure Databricks for building powerful end-to-end data pipelines. You'll also find out how to build a modern data warehouse by using Delta tables and Azure Synapse Analytics. Later, you’ll learn how to write ad hoc queries and extract meaningful insights from the data lake by creating visualizations and dashboards with Databricks SQL. Finally, you'll deploy and productionize a data pipeline as well as deploy notebooks and Azure Databricks service using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).By the end of this Azure book, you'll be able to use Azure Databricks to streamline different processes involved in building data-driven apps.

Machine Learning for Imbalanced Data. Tackle imbalanced datasets using machine learning and deep learning techniques

Kumar Abhishek, Dr. Mounir Abdelaziz

As machine learning practitioners, we often encounter imbalanced datasets in which one class has considerably fewer instances than the other. Many machine learning algorithms assume an equilibrium between majority and minority classes, leading to suboptimal performance on imbalanced data. This comprehensive guide helps you address this class imbalance to significantly improve model performance.Machine Learning for Imbalanced Data begins by introducing you to the challenges posed by imbalanced datasets and the importance of addressing these issues. It then guides you through techniques that enhance the performance of classical machine learning models when using imbalanced data, including various sampling and cost-sensitive learning methods.As you progress, you’ll delve into similar and more advanced techniques for deep learning models, employing PyTorch as the primary framework. Throughout the book, hands-on examples will provide working and reproducible code that’ll demonstrate the practical implementation of each technique.By the end of this book, you’ll be adept at identifying and addressing class imbalances and confidently applying various techniques, including sampling, cost-sensitive techniques, and threshold adjustment, while using traditional machine learning or deep learning models.

Clojure Data Analysis Cookbook. Dive into data analysis with Clojure through over 100 practical recipes for every stage of the analysis and collection process

Eric Richard Rochester

Becoming a Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Solution Architect. Implement industry-grade finance and supply chain solutions for successful enterprise resource planning (ERP)

Brent Dawson, Laurynas Merkelis

Implementing an ERP project is a daunting task, and it can often get derailed due to several reasons, including but not limited to inefficient planning, inadequate resource scoping, insufficient working knowledge of ERP systems, and more. Becoming a Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Solution Architect helps you understand the intricacies of ERP project implementation for seamless deployment.This comprehensive guide helps you gain a deep understanding of how to implement and optimize robust business applications that meet the evolving needs of organizations. You’ll discover various integration methodologies to integrate different software applications and plan successful data migration seamlessly. By leveraging the author’s expertise, you’ll explore different challenges that can lead to project failure or cost/time overruns, along with customized solutions to maneuver past those issues for a successful outcome.By the end of the book, you’ll be able to identify potential issues that can negatively impact the delivery of the project and make design decisions that will prevent any potential negative impact on the design and functionality of the system at go-live stage.

ASP.NET Web API Security Essentials. Take the security of your ASP.NET Web API to the next level using some of the most amazing security techniques around

Rajesh Gunasundaram

This book incorporates the new features of ASP.NET Web API 2 that will help you to secure an ASP.NET Web API and make a well-informed decision when choosing the right security mechanism for your security requirements.We start by showing you how to set up a browser client to utilize ASP.NET Web API services. We then cover ASP.NET Web API’s security architecture, authentication, and authorization to help you secure a web API from unauthorized users. Next, you will learn how to use SSL with ASP.NET Web API, including using SSL client certificates, and integrate the ASP.NET Identity system with ASP.NET Web API.We’ll show you how to secure a web API using OAuth2 to authenticate against a membership database using OWIN middleware. You will be able to use local logins to send authenticated requests using OAuth2. We also explain how to secure a web API using forms authentication and how users can log in with their Windows credentials using integrated Windows authentication. You will come to understand the need for external authentication services to enable OAuth/OpenID and social media authentication. We’ll then help you implement anti-Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) measures in ASP.NET Web API.Finally, you will discover how to enable Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) in your web API application.

Building Data-Driven Applications with LlamaIndex. A practical guide to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to enhance LLM applications

Andrei Gheorghiu

Discover the immense potential of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) with this comprehensive guide. Learn to overcome LLM limitations, such as contextual memory constraints, prompt size issues, real-time data gaps, and occasional ‘hallucinations’. Follow practical examples to personalize and launch your LlamaIndex projects, mastering skills in ingesting, indexing, querying, and connecting dynamic knowledge bases. From fundamental LLM concepts to LlamaIndex deployment and customization, this book provides a holistic grasp of LlamaIndex's capabilities and applications. By the end, you'll be able to resolve LLM challenges and build interactive AI-driven applications using best practices in prompt engineering and troubleshooting Generative AI projects.

Mastering Malware Analysis. A malware analyst's practical guide to combating malicious software, APT, cybercrime, and IoT attacks - Second Edition

Alexey Kleymenov, Amr Thabet

New and developing technologies inevitably bring new types of malware with them, creating a huge demand for IT professionals that can keep malware at bay. With the help of this updated second edition of Mastering Malware Analysis, you’ll be able to add valuable reverse-engineering skills to your CV and learn how to protect organizations in the most efficient way.This book will familiarize you with multiple universal patterns behind different malicious software types and teach you how to analyze them using a variety of approaches.You'll learn how to examine malware code and determine the damage it can possibly cause to systems, along with ensuring that the right prevention or remediation steps are followed. As you cover all aspects of malware analysis for Windows, Linux, macOS, and mobile platforms in detail, you’ll also get to grips with obfuscation, anti-debugging, and other advanced anti-reverse-engineering techniques. The skills you acquire in this cybersecurity book will help you deal with all types of modern malware, strengthen your defenses, and prevent or promptly mitigate breaches regardless of the platforms involved.By the end of this book, you will have learned how to efficiently analyze samples, investigate suspicious activity, and build innovative solutions to handle malware incidents.

Chef: Powerful Infrastructure Automation. Deploy software, manage hosts, and scale your infrastructure with Chef

Matthias Marschall, John Ewart, Earl Waud

Chef is a configuration management tool that turns IT infrastructure into code. Chef provides tools to manage systems at scale. This learning path takes you on a comprehensive tour of Chef's functionality, ranging from its core features to advanced development. You will be brought up to speed with what's new in Chef and how to set up your own Chef infrastructure for individuals, or small or large teams. You will learn to use the basic Chef command-line tools. We will also take you through the core concepts of managing users, applications, and your entire cloud infrastructure. You will learn the techniques of the pros by walking you through a host of step-by-step guides to solve real-world infrastructure automation challenges.You will learn to automate and document every aspect of your network, from the hardware to software, middleware, and all your containers. You will become familiar with the Chef'sProvisioning tool. By the end of this course, you will be confident in how to manage your infrastructure, scale using the cloud, and extend the built-in functionality of Chef itself.The books used in this Learning Path are:1) Chef Essentials2)Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook – Second Edition3)Mastering Chef Provisioning

Engineering MLOps. Rapidly build, test, and manage production-ready machine learning life cycles at scale

Emmanuel Raj

Engineering MLps presents comprehensive insights into MLOps coupled with real-world examples in Azure to help you to write programs, train robust and scalable ML models, and build ML pipelines to train and deploy models securely in production.The book begins by familiarizing you with the MLOps workflow so you can start writing programs to train ML models. Then you’ll then move on to explore options for serializing and packaging ML models post-training to deploy them to facilitate machine learning inference, model interoperability, and end-to-end model traceability. You’ll learn how to build ML pipelines, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and monitor pipelines to systematically build, deploy, monitor, and govern ML solutions for businesses and industries. Finally, you’ll apply the knowledge you’ve gained to build real-world projects.By the end of this ML book, you'll have a 360-degree view of MLOps and be ready to implement MLOps in your organization.

Beginning C++ Game Programming. Learn C++ from scratch and get started building your very own games

John Horton

This book is all about offering you a fun introduction to the world of game programming, C++, and the OpenGL-powered SFML using three fun, fully-playable games. These games are an addictive frantic two-button tapper, a multi-level zombie survival shooter, and a split-screen multiplayer puzzle-platformer.We will start with the very basics of programming, such as variables, loops, and conditions and you will become more skillful with each game as you move through the key C++ topics, such as OOP (Object-Orientated Programming), C++ pointers, and an introduction to the Standard Template Library. While building these games, you will also learn exciting game programming concepts like particle effects, directional sound (spatialization), OpenGL programmable Shaders, spawning thousands of objects, and more.