Learn Ethereum. A practical guide to help developers set up and run decentralized applications with Ethereum 2.0 - Second Edition

Xun (Brian) Wu, Zhihong Zou, Dongying Song

Ethereum is a blockchain-based, decentralized computing platform that allows you to run smart contracts. With this book, you’ll discover the latest Ethereum tools, frameworks, wallets, and layer 2, along with setting up and running decentralized applications for the complete, end-to-end development experience.Learn Ethereum, 2nd Edition is a comprehensive overview of the Ethereum ecosystem, exploring its concepts, mechanisms, and decentralized application development process. You’ll delve into Ethereum's internals, technologies, and tools, including Ethereum 2.0 and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), gas, and its account systems. You’ll also explore Ethereum's transition to proof of stake, L1/L2 scaling solutions, DeFi protocols, and the current marketplace. Additionally, you’ll learn about EVM-compatible blockchains, connectivity techniques, and advanced topics such as sharding, off-chain scaling, DAOs, Metaverse, and NFTs.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to write smart contracts and develop, test, and deploy DApps using various tools, wallets, and frameworks.

Practical Data Science with Python. Learn tools and techniques from hands-on examples to extract insights from data

Nathan George

Practical Data Science with Python teaches you core data science concepts, with real-world and realistic examples, and strengthens your grip on the basic as well as advanced principles of data preparation and storage, statistics, probability theory, machine learning, and Python programming, helping you build a solid foundation to gain proficiency in data science.The book starts with an overview of basic Python skills and then introduces foundational data science techniques, followed by a thorough explanation of the Python code needed to execute the techniques. You'll understand the code by working through the examples. The code has been broken down into small chunks (a few lines or a function at a time) to enable thorough discussion.As you progress, you will learn how to perform data analysis while exploring the functionalities of key data science Python packages, including pandas, SciPy, and scikit-learn. Finally, the book covers ethics and privacy concerns in data science and suggests resources for improving data science skills, as well as ways to stay up to date on new data science developments.By the end of the book, you should be able to comfortably use Python for basic data science projects and should have the skills to execute the data science process on any data source.

Mastering Ubuntu Server. Gain expertise in the art of deploying, configuring, managing, and troubleshooting Ubuntu Server - Third Edition

Jay LaCroix

Ubuntu Server has taken data centers around the world by storm. Whether you're deploying Ubuntu for a large-scale project or for a small office, it is a stable, customizable, and powerful Linux distribution with innovative and cutting-edge features. For both simple and complex server deployments, Ubuntu's flexible nature can be easily adapted to meet to the needs of your organization.This third edition is updated to cover the advancements of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and further train you to understand how to use Ubuntu Server, from initial deployment to creating production-ready resources for your network. The book begins with the concepts of user management, group management, and file system permissions. Continuing into managing storage volumes, you will learn how to format storage devices, utilize logical volume management, and monitor disk usage. Later, you will learn how to virtualize hosts and applications, which will include setting up QEMU & KVM, as well as containerization with both Docker and LXD. As the book continues, you will learn how to automate configuration with Ansible, as well as take a look at writing scripts. Lastly, you will explore best practices and troubleshooting techniques when working with Ubuntu Server that are applicable to real-world scenarios.By the end of this Ubuntu Server book, you will be well-versed in Ubuntu server’s advanced concepts and attain the required proficiency needed for Ubuntu Server administration.

Instant Oracle GoldenGate. A concise and clear step-by-step guide to get you quickly started with Oracle GoldenGate

Tony Bruzzese

Oracle GoldenGate is a comprehensive package for low-impact, real-time data capture, distribution, and delivery of transactional data across heterogeneous systems for continuous availability, zero downtime migration, and disaster recovery. All in all, it is a precise tool for data replication, regardless of the platform that you use in today’s environment. Instant Oracle GoldenGate exemplifies the ease of use of this package through the use of real-world examples. This book gives a good overview and hands-on approach to the most commonly used implementations in an Oracle GoldenGate environment.This How-to book will take you through a number of real-world examples quickly and effectively by eliminating much of the guess work for all users from novices to experienced users.You will learn about the key components of the architecture and simple one-way replication for a number of database tables or an entire schema. You’ll be covering key concepts and the implementation of high availability configurations such as Oracle RAC, encryption, and many different ways to transform and filter data to your target systems.

Cracking the IT Architect Interview. The ultimate guide to successful interviews for Enterprise, Business, Domain, Solution, and Technical Architect roles as well as IT Advisory Consultant and Software Designer roles

Sameer Paradkar

An architect attends multiple interviews for jobs or projects during the course of his or her career. This book is an interview resource created for designers, consultants, technical, solution, domain, enterprise, and chief architects to help them perform well in interview discussions and launch a successful career. The book begins by providing descriptions of architecture skills and competencies that cover the 12 key domains, including 350+ questions relating to these domains. The goal of this book is to cover all the core architectural domains. From an architect’s perspective, it is impossible to revise or learn about all these key areas without a good reference guide – this book is the solution. It shares experiences, learning, insights, and proven methodologies that will benefit practitioners, SMEs, and aspirants in the long run. This book will help you tackle the NFR domain, which is a key aspect pertaining to architecting applications.It typically takes years to understand the core concepts, fundamentals, patterns, and principles related to architecture and designs. This book is a goldmine for the typical questions asked during an interview and will help prepare you for success!

Mastering Windows Server 2016. A comprehensive and practical guide to Windows Server 2016

Jordan Krause

Windows Server 2016 is the server operating system developed by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems, developed concurrently with Windows 10. With Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has gotten us thinking outside of the box for what it means to be a system administration, and comes with some interesting new capabilities. These are exciting times to be or to become a server administrator!This book covers all aspects of administration level tasks and activities required to gain expertise in Microsoft Windows Server 2016. You will begin by getting familiar and comfortable navigating around in the interface. Next, you will learn to install and manage Windows Server 2016 and discover some tips for adapting to the new server management ideology that is all about centralized monitoring and configuration.You will deep dive into core Microsoft infrastructure technologies that the majority of companies are going to run on Server 2016. Core technologies such as Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, Certificate Services, File Services, and more. We will talk about networking in this new operating system, giving you a networking toolset that is useful for everyday troubleshooting and maintenance. Also discussed is the idea of Software Defined Networking. You will later walk through different aspects of certificate administration in Windows Server 2016. Three important and crucial areas to cover in the Remote Access role -- DirectAccess, VPN, and the Web Application Proxy -- are also covered.You will then move into security functions and benefits that are available in Windows Server 2016. Also covered is the brand new and all-important Nano Server!We will incorporate PowerShell as a central platform for performing many of the functions that are discussed in this book, including a chapter dedicated to the new PowerShell 5.0. Additionally, you will learn about the new built-in integration for Docker with this latest release of Windows Server 2016. The book ends with a discussion and information on virtualizing your datacenter with Hyper-V.By the end of this book, you will have all the ammunition required to start planning for and implementing Windows Server 2016.

Animating SwiftUI Applications. Create visually stunning and engaging animations for iOS with SwiftUI

Stephen DeStefano, J.D. Gauchat

Swift and SwiftUI are the backbone of Apple application development, making them a crucial skill set to learn. Animating SwiftUI Applications focuses on the creation of stunning animations, making you proficient in this declarative language and employing a minimal code approach.In this book, you'll start by exploring the fundamentals of SwiftUI and animation, before jumping into various projects that will cement these skills in practice. You will explore some simple projects, like animating circles, creating color spectrums with hueRotation, animating individual parts of an image, as well as combining multiple views together to produce dynamic creations. The book will then transition into more advanced animation projects that employ the GeometryReader, which helps align your animations across different devices, as well as creating word and color games. Finally, you will learn how to integrate the SpriteKit framework into our SwiftUI code to create scenes with wind, fire, rain, and or snow scene, along with adding physics, gravity, collisions, and particle emitters to your animations.By the end of this book, you’ll have created a number of different animation projects, and will have gained a deep understanding of SwiftUI that can be used for your own creations.

Go Programming Blueprints. Build real-world, production-ready solutions in Go using cutting-edge technology and techniques

Mat Ryer

3ds Max Speed Modeling for 3D Artists. Is your 3D modeling up to speed? It soon will be with this brilliant practical guide to speed modeling with 3ds Max, focusing on hard surfaces. Raise your productivity a notch and gain a new level of professionalism

Thomas Mooney

Production of 3D art is an exciting medium, but the task of modeling requires intense attention to detail, so speed and efficiency are vital. This book breaks down speed modeling workflow in 3ds Max into stages you can easily achieve, with a focus on hard surface modeling and methods you can apply to your own designs.3ds Max Speed Modeling for 3D Artists will help level up your 3D modeling skills. It focuses on hard surface modeling, and shows the range of tools and techniques in 3ds Max 2013.This book shows content creation methods aimed at 3ds Max modelers preparing to show their skill to the industry. The key feature of modeling that artists must exhibit is speediness while preserving technical accuracy. The author helps you follow set project guidelines while pushing creativity and outlines the entire workflow from concept development to exporting a game-ready model.The book begins with introductions for new users to the interface and modeling tools, and progresses to topics aimed at users already familiar with 3ds Max, who want to improve their content creation process. You'll also see ways 3ds Max content is used with other applications, like sculpting software and game editors, and learn features of speed modeling, efficient workflow, re-use of content, and tips on getting more done, more quickly.By the end of this book you will have learned key topics in modeling, ready to face professional level work with elan.

Cardboard VR Projects for Android. Develop mobile virtual reality apps using the native Google Cardboard SDK for Android

Jonathan Linowes, Matt Schoen

Google Cardboard is a low-cost, entry-level media platform through which you can experience virtual reality and virtual 3D environments. Its applications are as broad and varied as mobile smartphone applications themselves. This book will educate you on the best practices and methodology needed to build effective, stable, and performant mobile VR applications.In this book, we begin by defining virtual reality (VR) and how Google Cardboard fits into the larger VR and Android ecosystem. We introduce the underlying scientific and technical principles behind VR, including geometry, optics, rendering, and mobile software architecture. We start with a simple example app that ensures your environment is properly set up to write, build, and run the app. Then we develop a reusable VR graphics engine that you can build upon. And from then on, each chapter is a self-contained project where you will build an example from a different genre of application, including a 360 degree photo viewer, an educational simulation of our solar system, a 3D model viewer, and a music visualizer.Given the recent updates that were rolled out at Google I/O 2016, the authors of Cardboard VR Projects for Android have collated some technical notes to help you execute the projects in this book with Google VR Cardboard Java SDK 0.8, released in May 2016. Refer to the article at https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/GoogleVRUpdateGuideforCardbook.pdf which explains the updates to the source code of the projects.

Learn T-SQL Querying. A guide to developing efficient and elegant T-SQL code

Pedro Lopes, Pam Lahoud

Transact-SQL (T-SQL) is Microsoft's proprietary extension to the SQL language used with Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL Database. This book will be a usefu to learning the art of writing efficient T-SQL code in modern SQL Server versions as well as the Azure SQL Database.The book will get you started with query processing fundamentals to help you write powerful, performant T-SQL queries. You will then focus on query execution plans and leverage them for troubleshooting. In later chapters, you will explain how to identify various T-SQL patterns and anti-patterns. This will help you analyze execution plans to gain insights into current performance, and determine whether or not a query is scalable. You will also build diagnostic queries using dynamic management views (DMVs) and dynamic management functions (DMFs) to address various challenges in T-SQL execution. Next, you will work with the built-in tools of SQL Server to shorten the time taken to address query performance and scalability issues. In the concluding chapters, this will guide you through implementing various features, such as Extended Events, Query Store, and Query Tuning Assistant, using hands-on examples.By the end of the book, you will have developed the skills to determine query performance bottlenecks, avoid pitfalls, and discover the anti-patterns in use.

Mastering Azure Virtual Desktop. The ultimate guide to the implementation and management of Azure Virtual Desktop

Ryan Mangan, Jim Moyle

Azure Virtual Desktop is a cloud desktop virtualization platform that securely delivers virtual desktops and remote apps. Mastering Azure Virtual Desktop will guide you through designing, implementing, configuring, and maintaining an Azure Virtual Desktop environment effectively. This book can also be used as an exam preparation guide to help you sit the Microsoft AZ-140 exam.You’ll start with an introduction to the essentials of Azure Virtual Desktop. Next, you’ll get to grips with planning an Azure Virtual Desktop architecture before learning how to implement an Azure Virtual Desktop environment. Moving ahead, you’ll learn how to manage and control access as well as configure security controls on your Azure Virtual Desktop environment. As you progress, you’ll understand how to manage user environments and configure MSIX app attach and other Azure Virtual Desktop features to enhance the user experience. You’ll also learn about the Azure Active Directory (AD) join and getting started feature. Finally, you’ll discover how to monitor and maintain an Azure Virtual Desktop environment to help you support your users and diagnose issues when they occur.By the end of this Microsoft Azure book, you’ll have covered all the essential topics you need to know to design and manage Azure Virtual Desktop and prepare for the AZ-140 exam.

50 Kubernetes Concepts Every DevOps Engineer Should Know. Your go-to guide for making production-level decisions on how and why to implement Kubernetes

Michael Levan

Kubernetes is a trending topic among engineers, CTOs, CIOs, and other technically sound professionals. Due to its proliferation and importance for all cloud technologies, DevOps engineers nowadays need a solid grasp of key Kubernetes concepts to help their organization thrive.This book equips you with all the requisite information about how Kubernetes works and how to use it for the best results. You’ll learn everything from why cloud native is important to implementing Kubernetes clusters to deploying applications in production. This book takes you on a learning journey, starting from what cloud native is and how to get started with Kubernetes in the cloud, on-premises, and PaaS environments such as OpenShift. Next, you’ll learn about deploying applications in many ways, including Deployment specs, Ingress Specs, and StatefulSet specs. Finally, you’ll be comfortable working with Kubernetes monitoring, observability, and security. Each chapter of 50 Kubernetes Concepts Every DevOps Engineer Should Know is built upon the previous chapter, ensuring that you develop practical skills as you work through the code examples in GitHub, allowing you to follow along while giving you practical knowledge.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to implement Kubernetes in any environment, whether it’s an existing environment, a greenfield environment, or your very own lab running in the cloud or your home.

Learning Qlik Sense: The Official Guide. Get the most out of your Qlik Sense investment with the latest insight and guidance direct from the Qlik Sense team - Second Edition

Christopher Ilacqua, QlikTech International AB, Henric Cronström, James Richardson

The intuitive and powerful Qlik Sense visual analytics software allows anyone to engage in data discovery, to explore your data, and find meaningful insights to empower your business. Qlik Sense lets you easily create personalized reports and visualizations and reveal essential connections to show new opportunities from every angle.Written by members of the Qlik Sense team, this book is the official guide from Qlik to understanding and using their powerful new product with fully updated coverage to the latest features of the most modern edition of Qlik Sense. Benefit from the vision behind the development of Qlik Sense and get to grips with how Qlik Sense can empower you as a data discovery consumer. Learn how to create your own applications for Qlik Sense to customize it to meet your personal needs for business intelligence, and how to oversee and administer the Qlik Sense data architecture. Finally, explore utilizing Qlik Sense to uncover essential data, with practical examples on finding and visualizing intelligence for sales figures, human resources information, travel expense tracking, and demographic data discovery.

Python Image Processing Cookbook. Over 60 recipes to help you perform complex image processing and computer vision tasks with ease

Sandipan Dey

With the advancements in wireless devices and mobile technology, there's increasing demand for people with digital image processing skills in order to extract useful information from the ever-growing volume of images. This book provides comprehensive coverage of the relevant tools and algorithms, and guides you through analysis and visualization for image processing.With the help of over 60 cutting-edge recipes, you'll address common challenges in image processing and learn how to perform complex tasks such as object detection, image segmentation, and image reconstruction using large hybrid datasets. Dedicated sections will also take you through implementing various image enhancement and image restoration techniques, such as cartooning, gradient blending, and sparse dictionary learning. As you advance, you'll get to grips with face morphing and image segmentation techniques. With an emphasis on practical solutions, this book will help you apply deep learning techniques such as transfer learning and fine-tuning to solve real-world problems.By the end of this book, you'll be proficient in utilizing the capabilities of the Python ecosystem to implement various image processing techniques effectively.

Open Text Metastorm ProVision 6.2 Strategy Implementation. Create and implement a successful business strategy for improved performance throughout the whole enterprise

Bill Aronson

Open Text ProVision® (formerly known as Metastorm ProVision®) is an Enterprise Architecture (EA) solution allowing for effective planning and decision making throughout the enterprise. It enables an organization to have a central repository of information about the business, reducing organizational risks and better optimizing business resources.Implemented well, it enables better and more actionable decisions exactly when you need them.This book combines theory and practice to provide a step- by- step guide to building a successful customer- centric model of your business. The approach is simple and down to earth, and along the way, with various real-world examples, you will learn how to make a business case, use a framework, and adopt a methodology with Open Text ProVision®. This book draws on the experience of ProVision® experts around the world. By combining theory with practice from the field you can avoid common mistakes and develop a successful customer centric strategy for implementing ProVision®. Each chapter builds on the previous one to give you the confidence to implement a central repository, dealing with both the technical and human issues that you might face.

Mastering Ubuntu Server. Upgrade your Ubuntu skills

Jay LaCroix

Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux operating system, and has various versions targeted at servers, desktops, phones, tablets and televisions. The Ubuntu Server Edition, also called Ubuntu Server, offers support for several common configurations, and also simplifies common Linux server deployment processes.With this book as their guide, readers will be able to configure and deploy Ubuntu Servers using Ubuntu Server 16.04, with all the skills necessary to manage real servers. The book begins with the concept of user management, group management, as well as file-system permissions. To manage your storage on Ubuntu Server systems, you will learn how to add and format storage and view disk usage. Later, you will also learn how to configure network interfaces, manage IP addresses, deploy Network Manager in order to connect to networks, and manage network interfaces. Furthermore, you will understand how to start and stop services so that you can manage running processes on Linux servers. The book will then demonstrate how to access and share files to or from Ubuntu Servers. You will learn how to create and manage databases using MariaDB and share web content with Apache. To virtualize hosts and applications, you will be shown how to set up KVM/Qemu and Docker and manage virtual machines with virt-manager. Lastly, you will explore best practices and troubleshooting techniques when working with Ubuntu Servers.By the end of the book, you will be an expert Ubuntu Server user well-versed in its advanced concepts.

Blender 3D By Example. Design a complete workflow with Blender to create stunning 3D scenes and films step-by-step!

Gordon Fisher, Romain Caudron, Pierre-Armand Nicq

Azure for Architects. Create secure, scalable, high-availability applications on the cloud - Third Edition

Ritesh Modi, Jack Lee, Rithin Skaria

Thanks to its support for high availability, scalability, security, performance, and disaster recovery, Azure has been widely adopted to create and deploy different types of application with ease. Updated for the latest developments, this third edition of Azure for Architects helps you get to grips with the core concepts of designing serverless architecture, including containers, Kubernetes deployments, and big data solutions.You'll learn how to architect solutions such as serverless functions, you'll discover deployment patterns for containers and Kubernetes, and you'll explore large-scale big data processing using Spark and Databricks. As you advance, you'll implement DevOps using Azure DevOps, work with intelligent solutions using Azure Cognitive Services, and integrate security, high availability, and scalability into each solution. Finally, you'll delve into Azure security concepts such as OAuth, OpenConnect, and managed identities.By the end of this book, you'll have gained the confidence to design intelligent Azure solutions based on containers and serverless functions.

Drone Development from Concept to Flight. Design, assemble, and discover the applications of unmanned aerial vehicles

Sumit Sharma

Unlock opportunities in the growing UAV market where drones are revolutionizing diverse sectors like agriculture, surveying, and the military. This book walks you through the complete drone development life cycle, from concept to pilot stage, prototyping, and ultimately, a market-ready product, with domain-specific applications.Starting with an introduction to unmanned systems, principles of drone flight, and it's motion in 3D space, this book shows you how to design a propulsion system tailored to your drone’s needs. You’ll then get hands on with the entire drone assembly process, covering airframe, components, and wiring. Next, you’ll enhance drone connectivity and navigation with communication devices, such as RFD900, Herelink, and H-16 Pro GCS and hardware protocols like I2C, and UART. The book also guides you in using the open-source flight software ArduPilot and PX4, along with firmware architecture and PID tuning for advanced control. Additionally, you’ll go learn about AeroGCS, Mission Planner, and UGCS ground control stations, tips for maiden flight and log analysis for optimizing performance while building a custom survey drone with a 60-min endurance, 10km range, live video feed, and photography options.By the end of this book, you’ll be equipped with all you need to build and fly your own drones and UAVs.

Go Programming Blueprints. Build real-world, production-ready solutions in Go using cutting-edge technology and techniques - Second Edition

Mat Ryer

Go is the language of the Internet age, and the latest version of Go comes with major architectural changes. Implementation of the language, runtime, and libraries has changed significantly. The compiler and runtime are now written entirely in Go. The garbage collector is now concurrent and provides dramatically lower pause times by running in parallel with other Go routines when possible.This book will show you how to leverage all the latest features and much more. This book shows you how to build powerful systems and drops you into real-world situations. You will learn to develop high quality command-line tools that utilize the powerful shell capabilities and perform well using Go's in-built concurrency mechanisms. Scale, performance, and high availability lie at the heart of our projects, and the lessons learned throughout this book will arm you with everything you need to build world-class solutions. You will get a feel for app deployment using Docker and Google App Engine. Each project could form the basis of a start-up, which means they are directly applicable to modern software markets.

ASP.NET 8 Best Practices. Explore techniques, patterns, and practices to develop effective large-scale .NET web apps

Jonathan R. Danylko

As .NET 8 emerges as a long-term support (LTS) release designed to assist developers in migrating legacy applications to ASP.NET, this best practices book becomes your go-to guide for exploring the intricacies of ASP.NET and advancing your skills as a software engineer, full-stack developer, or web architect.This book will lead you through project structure and layout, setting up robust source control, and employing pipelines for automated project building. You’ll focus on ASP.NET components and gain insights into their commonalities. As you advance, you’ll cover middleware best practices, learning how to handle frontend tasks involving JavaScript, CSS, and image files. You’ll examine the best approach for working with Blazor applications and familiarize yourself with controllers and Razor Pages. Additionally, you’ll discover how to leverage Entity Framework Core and exception handling in your application. In the later chapters, you’ll master components that enhance project organization, extensibility, security, and performance.By the end of this book, you’ll have acquired a comprehensive understanding of industry-proven concepts and best practices to build real-world ASP.NET 8.0 websites confidently.

Clojure for Data Science. Statistics, big data, and machine learning for Clojure programmers

Henry Garner

Building Modern SaaS Applications with C# and .NET. Build, deploy, and maintain professional SaaS applications

Andy Watt

There are several concepts that must be mastered to deliver functional and efficient SaaS applications. This book is perfect for developers and teams with experience in traditional application development looking to switch to SaaS and deliver slick and modern applications. You‘ll start with a general overview of SaaS as a concept and learn with the help of an example throughout the book to bring life to the technical descriptions. You’ll use the Microsoft .NET tech stack for development and C# as the programming language to develop your desired SaaS application.Delivering SaaS requires a deep understanding of all layers in the application stack. As you progress, you’ll learn how to approach the database layer, the API, and the UI to confidently approach application development using the SaaS model. Additionally, you’ll explore how to test, deploy, maintain, and upgrade each component of the application.By the end of this book, you will be well equipped to approach all aspects of delivering software using the SaaS paradigm.