The Art of Social Engineering. Uncover the secrets behind the human dynamics in cybersecurity

Cesar Bravo, Desilda Toska, Rhonda Childress

Social engineering is one of the most prevalent methods used by attackers to steal data and resources from individuals, companies, and even government entities. This book serves as a comprehensive guide to understanding social engineering attacks and how to protect against them.The Art of Social Engineering starts by giving you an overview of the current cyber threat landscape, explaining the psychological techniques involved in social engineering attacks, and then takes you through examples to demonstrate how to identify those attacks.You’ll learn the most intriguing psychological principles exploited by attackers, including influence, manipulation, rapport, persuasion, and empathy, and gain insights into how attackers leverage technology to enhance their attacks using fake logins, email impersonation, fake updates, and executing attacks through social media. This book will equip you with the skills to develop your own defensive strategy, including awareness campaigns, phishing campaigns, cybersecurity training, and a variety of tools and techniques.By the end of this social engineering book, you’ll be proficient in identifying cyberattacks and safeguarding against the ever-growing threat of social engineering with your defensive arsenal.

Laravel 5.x Cookbook. Click here to enter text

Terry Matula, Alfred Nutile

Laravel is a prominent member of a new generation of web frameworks. It is one of the most popular PHP frameworks and is also free and an open source. Laravel 5 is a substantial upgrade with a lot of new toys, at the same time retaining the features that made Laravel wildly successful. It comes with plenty of architectural as well as design-based changes.The book is a blend of numerous recipes that will give you all the necessary tips you need to build an application. It starts with basic installation and configuration tasks and will get you up-and-running in no time. You will learn to create and customize your PHP app and tweak and re-design your existing apps for better performance. You will learn to implement practical recipes to utilize Laravel’s modular structure, the latest method injection, route caching, and interfacing techniques to create responsive modern-day PHP apps that stand on their own against other apps. Efficient testing and deploying techniques will make you more confident with your Laravel skills as you move ahead with this book.Towards the end of the book, you will understand a number of add-ons and new features essential to finalize your application to make it ready for subscriptions. You will be empowered to get your application out to the world.

Python Data Mining Quick Start Guide. A beginner's guide to extracting valuable insights from your data

Nathan Greeneltch

Data mining is a necessary and predictable response to the dawn of the information age. It is typically defined as the pattern and/ or trend discovery phase in the data mining pipeline, and Python is a popular tool for performing these tasks as it offers a wide variety of tools for data mining.This book will serve as a quick introduction to the concept of data mining and putting it to practical use with the help of popular Python packages and libraries. You will get a hands-on demonstration of working with different real-world datasets and extracting useful insights from them using popular Python libraries such as NumPy, pandas, scikit-learn, and matplotlib. You will then learn the different stages of data mining such as data loading, cleaning, analysis, and visualization. You will also get a full conceptual description of popular data transformation, clustering, and classification techniques.By the end of this book, you will be able to build an efficient data mining pipeline using Python without any hassle.

Java Hibernate Cookbook. Over 50 recipes to help you build dynamic and powerful real-time Java Hibernate applications

Yogesh Prajapati, Vishal Ranapariya

This book will provide a useful hands-on guide to Hibernate to accomplish the development of a real-time Hibernate application.We will start with the basics of Hibernate, which include setting up Hibernate – the pre-requisites and multiple ways of configuring Hibernate using Java. We will then dive deep into the fundamentals of Hibernate such as SessionFactory, session, criteria, working with objects and criteria. This will help a developer have a better understanding of how Hibernate works and what needs to be done to run a Hibernate application. Moving on, we will learn how to work with annotations, associations and collections. In the final chapters, we will see explore querying, advanced Hibernate concepts and integration with other frameworks.

Learning Joomla! 3 Extension Development. If you have ideas for additional Joomla 3! features, this book will allow you to realize them. It's a complete practical guide to building and extending plugins, modules, and components. Ideal for professional developers and enthusiasts. - Third Edition

Tim Plummer, Timothy John Plummer

Joomla 3 is the first of the major open source content management systems that was meant to be mobile friendly by default. Joomla uses object-oriented principles, is database agnostic, and has the best mix of functionality, extensibility, and user friendliness. Add to that the fact that Joomla is completely community driven, and you have a winning combination that is available to everyone, and is the perfect platform to build your own custom applications.Learning Joomla! 3 Extension Development is an integrated series of practical, hands-on tutorials that guide you through building and extending Joomla plugins, modules, and components. With Joomla having been downloaded well over 35 million times, there is a huge market for Joomla extensions, so you could potentially earn some extra cash in your spare time using your newly acquired Joomla extension development skills.We will start with developing simple plugins and modules, and then progress to more complex backend and frontend component development. Then we will try our hand at ethical hacking, so you will learn about common security vulnerabilities and what you can do to avoid them. After that we will look at how you can prepare your extensions for distribution and updates, as well as how you can extend your components with various plugins and modules. Finally, you will end up with a fully functioning package of extensions that you can use on your own site or share with others.If you want to build your own custom applications in Joomla, then Learning Joomla! 3 Extension Development will teach you everything you need to know in a practical, hands-on manner.

Programming MapReduce with Scalding. A practical guide to designing, testing, and implementing complex MapReduce applications in Scala

Antonios Chalkiopoulos

Mastering Drupal 8. An advanced guide to building and maintaining Drupal websites

Chaz Chumley, William Hurley

Drupal is an open source content management system trusted by governments and organizations around the globe to run their websites. It brings with it extensive content authoring tools, reliable performance, and a proven track record of security. The community of more than 1,000,000 developers, designers, editors, and others have developed and maintained a wealth of modules, themes, and other add-ons to help you build a dynamic web experience.Drupal 8 is the latest release of the Drupal built on the Symfony2 framework. This is the largest change to the Drupal project in its history. The entire API of Drupal has been rebuilt using Symfony and everything from the administrative UI to themes to custom module development has been affected.This book will cover everything you need to plan and build a complete website using Drupal 8. It will provide a clear and concise walkthrough of the more than 200 new features and improvements introduced in Drupal core. In this book, you will learn advanced site building techniques, create and modify themes using Twig, create custom modules using the new Drupal API, explore the new REST and Multilingual functionality, import, and export Configuration, and learn how to migrate from earlier versions of Drupal.

Network Automation with Go. Learn how to automate network operations and build applications using the Go programming language

Nicolas Leiva, Michael Kashin

Go’s built-in first-class concurrency mechanisms make it an ideal choice for long-lived low-bandwidth I/O operations, which are typical requirements of network automation and network operations applications.This book provides a quick overview of Go and hands-on examples within it to help you become proficient with Go for network automation. It’s a practical guide that will teach you how to automate common network operations and build systems using Go.The first part takes you through a general overview, use cases, strengths, and inherent weaknesses of Go to prepare you for a deeper dive into network automation, which is heavily reliant on understanding this programming language. You’ll explore the common network automation areas and challenges, what language features you can use in each of those areas, and the common software tools and packages. To help deepen your understanding, you’ll also work through real-world network automation problems and apply hands-on solutions to them.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with Go and have a solid grasp on network automation.

Apache Flume: Distributed Log Collection for Hadoop. If your role includes moving datasets into Hadoop, this book will help you do it more efficiently using Apache Flume. From installation to customization, it's a complete step-by-step guide on making the service work for you

Steve Hoffman, Steven Hoffman, Kevin A. McGrail

Apache Flume is a distributed, reliable, and available service for efficiently collecting, aggregating, and moving large amounts of log data. Its main goal is to deliver data from applications to Apache Hadoop's HDFS. It has a simple and flexible architecture based on streaming data flows. It is robust and fault tolerant with many failover and recovery mechanisms.Apache Flume: Distributed Log Collection for Hadoop covers problems with HDFS and streaming data/logs, and how Flume can resolve these problems. This book explains the generalized architecture of Flume, which includes moving data to/from databases, NO-SQL-ish data stores, as well as optimizing performance. This book includes real-world scenarios on Flume implementation.Apache Flume: Distributed Log Collection for Hadoop starts with an architectural overview of Flume and then discusses each component in detail. It guides you through the complete installation process and compilation of Flume.It will give you a heads-up on how to use channels and channel selectors. For each architectural component (Sources, Channels, Sinks, Channel Processors, Sink Groups, and so on) the various implementations will be covered in detail along with configuration options. You can use it to customize Flume to your specific needs. There are pointers given on writing custom implementations as well that would help you learn and implement them.By the end, you should be able to construct a series of Flume agents to transport your streaming data and logs from your systems into Hadoop in near real time.

Mastering Python Networking. Your one-stop solution to using Python for network automation, programmability, and DevOps - Third Edition

Eric Chou, Michael Kennedy, Mandy Whaley

Networks in your infrastructure set the foundation for how your application can be deployed, maintained, and serviced. Python is the ideal language for network engineers to explore tools that were previously available to systems engineers and application developers. In Mastering Python Networking, Third edition, you’ll embark on a Python-based journey to transition from traditional network engineers to network developers ready for the next-generation of networks.This new edition is completely revised and updated to work with Python 3. In addition to new chapters on network data analysis with ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and Beats) and Azure Cloud Networking, it includes updates on using newer libraries such as pyATS and Nornir, as well as Ansible 2.8. Each chapter is updated with the latest libraries with working examples to ensure compatibility and understanding of the concepts.Starting with a basic overview of Python, the book teaches you how it can interact with both legacy and API-enabled network devices. You will learn to leverage high-level Python packages and frameworks to perform network automation tasks, monitoring, management, and enhanced network security followed by Azure and AWS Cloud networking. Finally, you will use Jenkins for continuous integration as well as testing tools to verify your network.

Cloud Solution Architect's Career Master Plan. Proven techniques and effective tips to help you become a successful solution architect

Rick Weyenberg, Kyle Burns

In the fast-paced tech world where businesses rely ever more on cloud infrastructure, the role of a cloud solution architect serves as the backbone of operations. The Solution Architects Career Masterplan isn’t just informative; it’s an actionable roadmap to thriving in this role, providing the knowledge and strategies necessary to build a successful career in cloud computing.You’ll dive headfirst into mastering the role's core principles, strategically charting your career trajectory, and expanding your network within the cloud community. As you advance to the practical aspects, you’ll explore tailored education options, gain hands-on experience, and prepare to seize strategic opportunities. Finally, you’ll prepare for success by arming yourself with interview strategies, staying updated with evolving cloud technologies, and actively contributing to the cloud community.By the end of this book, you'll be on your path to a rewarding career in cloud architecture with this trusted companion.

openFrameworks Essentials. Create stunning, interactive openFrameworks-based applications with this fast-paced guide

Igor Tatarnikov, Denis Perevalov

Arduino: Building exciting LED based projects and espionage devices. Click here to enter text

Utsav Shah, Marco Schwartz, Adith Jagdish Boloor, Samarth Shah

An Arduino might be a tiny computer but it can be used as the foundation for a huge range of projects. In this course, we’ll show you how just some of the projects that are possible with an Arduino. From robotics to secret agent gadgets, we’re pretty confident that this course will get you thinking creatively – and inspire you to create your very own new projects using the Arduino hacking skills you learn.This course, combines both text and video content – it’s made up of three modules to help organize your learning. In the first module we’ll show you how to build three different Arduino projects. All of these will not only get you up and running with something practical, they’ll also help you better understand how the Arduino works. Find out how to develop a home automation system and even build a robot!In the second module we’ll go one step further to help you get creative as you learn how to program LEDs with your Arduino. You’ll find out how to build a mood lamp and a remote-controlled TV backlight, before going on to make a sound controlled LED Christmas tree that makes use of sound visualization.Finally, the third module takes you from stylish design into espionage, as you learn how to create neat secret agent gadgets with your Arduino. Find out how to build an alarm system, a fingerprint sensor, even open a lock with a text message. And that’s not all – but to find out more you’ll have to dive in!This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products:?Arduino By Example by Adith Jagdish Boloor?Arduino BLINK Blueprints by Samarth Shah, Utsav Shah?Arduino for Secret Agents by Marco Shwartz

ROS 2 from Scratch. Get started with ROS 2 and create robotics applications with Python and C++

Edouard Renard

ROS 2 from Scratch, written by the cofounder of a robotics company with years of experience in teaching and engineering, will equip you with the skills necessary to develop cutting-edge robotic systems efficiently.This book will help you understand why you should use Robot Operating System (ROS), clarifying what ROS is and isn’t. It focuses on applied learning—no unnecessary filler, no abstract theory, and no abrupt leaps into complex topics. You’ll discover how to install ROS 2, set up your environment, and explore concepts through hands-on experiments, as well as create a ROS 2 application for a custom robot. The chapters expand upon core concepts such as nodes, communication via topics, client-server interactions with services, complex behaviors using actions, runtime configurations with parameters, and seamless node orchestration via launch files. Each concept is clearly explained with the help of real-life analogies and practical examples, using Python and C++. The book will also guide you through creating a real-world project that incorporates TFs, URDF, RViz, and Gazebo.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to create new software for any robot in no time and easily join existing projects for new job roles, research endeavors, and beyond.

Teaching with Google Classroom. To provide a step-by-step guide to setup and use Google Classroom

Michael Zhang

Google Classroom helps teachers bring their work online. According to Google Trends, it’s already bigger than Moodle after barely a year in the wild. This book is a complete start-to-finish guide for teachers using Google Classroom for the first time. It explains what Google Classroom is, what it can do, how to set it up, and how to use it to enhance student learning while making your life as a teacher easier. It shows you how to place resources and activities online, gather assignments, and develop group and individual activities. It’s not just a manual, you’ll also discover inspiring, easy ways to put Google Classroom to work for you and your class.

Protocol Buffers Handbook. Getting deeper into Protobuf internals and its usage

Clément Jean

Explore how Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) serialize structured data and provides a language-neutral, platform-neutral, and extensible solution. With this guide to mastering Protobuf, you'll build your skills to effectively serialize, transmit, and manage data across diverse platforms and languages.This book will help you enter the world of Protocol Buffers by unraveling the intricate nuances of Protobuf syntax and showing you how to define complex data structures. As you progress, you’ll learn schema evolution, ensuring seamless compatibility as your projects evolve. The book also covers advanced topics such as custom options and plugins, allowing you to tailor validation processes to your specific requirements. You’ll understand how to automate project builds using cutting-edge tools such as Buf and Bazel, streamlining your development workflow. With hands-on projects in Go and Python programming, you’ll learn how to practically apply Protobuf concepts. Later chapters will show you how to integrate data interchange capabilities across different programming languages, enabling efficient collaboration and system interoperability.By the end of this book, you’ll have a solid understanding of Protobuf internals, enabling you to discern when and how to use and redefine your approach to data serialization.

DAX Cookbook. Over 120 recipes to enhance your business with analytics, reporting, and business intelligence

Greg Deckler

DAX provides an extra edge by extracting key information from the data that is already present in your model. Filled with examples of practical, real-world calculations geared toward business metrics and key performance indicators, this cookbook features solutions that you can apply for your own business analysis needs.You'll learn to write various DAX expressions and functions to understand how DAX queries work. The book also covers sections on dates, time, and duration to help you deal with working days, time zones, and shifts. You'll then discover how to manipulate text and numbers to create dynamic titles and ranks, and deal with measure totals. Later, you'll explore common business metrics for finance, customers, employees, and projects. The book will also show you how to implement common industry metrics such as days of supply, mean time between failure, order cycle time and overall equipment effectiveness. In the concluding chapters, you'll learn to apply statistical formulas for covariance, kurtosis, and skewness. Finally, you'll explore advanced DAX patterns for interpolation, inverse aggregators, inverse slicers, and even forecasting with a deseasonalized correlation coefficient.By the end of this book, you'll have the skills you need to use DAX's functionality and flexibility in business intelligence and data analytics.

Mastering Linux Security and Hardening. Protect your Linux systems from intruders, malware attacks, and other cyber threats - Second Edition

Donald A. Tevault

From creating networks and servers to automating the entire working environment, Linux has been extremely popular with system administrators for the last couple of decades. However, security has always been a major concern. With limited resources available in the Linux security domain, this book will be an invaluable guide in helping you get your Linux systems properly secured.Complete with in-depth explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book begins by helping you set up a practice lab environment and takes you through the core functionalities of securing Linux. You'll practice various Linux hardening techniques and advance to setting up a locked-down Linux server. As you progress, you will also learn how to create user accounts with appropriate privilege levels, protect sensitive data by setting permissions and encryption, and configure a firewall. The book will help you set up mandatory access control, system auditing, security profiles, and kernel hardening, and finally cover best practices and troubleshooting techniques to secure your Linux environment efficiently.By the end of this Linux security book, you will be able to confidently set up a Linux server that will be much harder for malicious actors to compromise.

Flutter for Beginners. An introductory guide to building cross-platform mobile applications with Flutter 2.5 and Dart - Second Edition

Thomas Bailey, Alessandro Biessek, Trevor Wills

There have been many attempts at creating frameworks that are truly cross-platform, but most struggle to create a native-like experience at high performance levels. Flutter achieves this with an elegant design and a wealth of third-party plugins, making it the future of mobile app development. If you are a mobile developer who wants to create rich and expressive native apps with the latest Google Flutter framework, this book is for you.This book will guide you through developing your first app from scratch all the way to production release. Starting with the setup of your development environment, you'll learn about your app's UI design and responding to user input via Flutter widgets, manage app navigation and screen transitions, and create widget animations. You'll then explore the rich set of third party-plugins, including Firebase and Google Maps, and get to grips with testing and debugging. Finally, you'll get up to speed with releasing your app to mobile stores and the web.By the end of this Flutter book, you'll have gained the confidence to create, edit, test, and release a full Flutter app on your own.

AI & Data Literacy. Empowering Citizens of Data Science

Bill Schmarzo

AI is undoubtedly a game-changing tool with immense potential to improve human life.This book aims to empower you as a Citizen of Data Science, covering the privacy, ethics, and theoretical concepts you’ll need to exploit to thrive amid the current and future developments in the AI landscape.We'll explore AI's inner workings, user intent, and the critical role of the AI utility function while also briefly touching on statistics and prediction to build decision models that leverage AI and data for highly informed, more accurate, and less risky decisions.Additionally, we'll discuss how organizations of all sizes can leverage AI and data to engineer or create value. We'll establish why economies of learning are more powerful than the economies of scale in a digital-centric world. Ethics and personal/organizational empowerment in the context of AI will also be addressed.Lastly, we'll delve into ChatGPT and the role of Large Language Models (LLMs), preparing you for the growing importance of Generative AI. By the end of the book, you'll have a deeper understanding of AI and how best to leverage it and thrive alongside it.

Windows Server 2012 R2 Administrator Cookbook. Over 80 hands-on recipes to effectively administer and manage your Windows Server 2012 R2 infrastructure in enterprise environments

Jordan Krause

Learning Puppet for Windows Server. Organize your Windows environment using Puppet tools to unload administrative burdens in a short time!

Fuat Ulugay

Powershell Core 6.2 Cookbook. Leverage command-line shell scripting to effectively manage your enterprise environment

Jan-Hendrik Peters

This book will follow a recipe-based approach and start off with an introduction to the fundamentals of PowerShell, and explaining how to install and run it through simple examples. Next, you will learn how to use PowerShell to access and manipulate data and how to work with different streams as well. You will also explore the object model which will help with regard to PowerShell function deployment. Going forward, you will get familiar with the pipeline in its different use cases. The next set of chapters will deal with the different ways of accessing data in PowerShell. You will also learn to automate various tasks in Windows and Linux using PowerShell Core, as well as explore Windows Server. Later, you will be introduced to Remoting in PowerShell Core and Just Enough Administration concept. The last set of chapters will help you understand the management of a private and public cloud with PowerShell Core. You will also learn how to access web services and explore the high-performance scripting methods.By the end of this book, you will gain the skills to manage complex tasks effectively along with increasing the performance of your environment.

Learning Karaf Cellar. Build and implement a complete clustering solution for the Apache Karaf OSGi container

Jean Baptiste Onofre