Real-Time Animation with Adobe Character Animator. Animate characters in real time with webcam, microphone, and custom actions

Chad Troftgruben

Adobe Character Animator is a power app for non-animators that provides easy rigging and easy-to- understand tools that enable you to create entertainment or business videos in no time.This guide to Character Animator gives you a comprehensive overview of the app, helping you learn the entire process—from importing a character designed in Adobe Photoshop to animating a sequence. Complete with background art, multiple character rigs and Character Animator project files, this book will show you how to animate a scene in Character Animator from start to finish.Starting with a character PSD from another artist, you’ll organize and condense the file to prepare it for rigging and animation. From there, you’ll systematically rig the character while exploring advanced behaviors and triggers to animate a complex scene that takes advantage of the app’s best features.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to create appealing animations in Character Animator for any purpose.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Blueprints. Master SharePoint application development by building exciting SharePoint business solutions with this book and

Mike Oryszak, Michael C Oryszak

SharePoint is an incredibly powerful platform that can support a wide variety of business scenarios. In many cases it needs to be configured or extended in order to deliver fully featured business solutions.While some books merely talk about the capabilities of SharePoint in general and leave you to figure out how they apply to your situation, this book takes a different approach. Each chapter provides easy-to-understand, step-by-step instructions along with screenshots to help build exciting SharePoint business solutions that extend the platform. By the end of this book the reader will be a SharePoint developer to be reckoned with.This book will dive into a diverse set of real-world scenarios to deliver sample business solutions that can serve as the foundation for your own solutions. This book draws from the author's extensive experience with SharePoint to leverage the platforms underlying services to provide solutions that can support Social Collaboration, Content and Document Management, as well as project collaboration. Each chapter represents a new business solution that builds on the overall platform to deliver more complex solutions and more advanced techniques. By the end of the book the reader will understand how to leverage the SharePoint platform to build their own business solutions.

Modern Generative AI with ChatGPT and OpenAI Models. Leverage the capabilities of OpenAI's LLM for productivity and innovation with GPT3 and GPT4

Valentina Alto

Generative AI models and AI language models are becoming increasingly popular due to their unparalleled capabilities. This book will provide you with insights into the inner workings of the LLMs and guide you through creating your own language models. You’ll start with an introduction to the field of generative AI, helping you understand how these models are trained to generate new data.Next, you’ll explore use cases where ChatGPT can boost productivity and enhance creativity. You’ll learn how to get the best from your ChatGPT interactions by improving your prompt design and leveraging zero, one, and few-shots learning capabilities. The use cases are divided into clusters of marketers, researchers, and developers, which will help you apply what you learn in this book to your own challenges faster.You’ll also discover enterprise-level scenarios that leverage OpenAI models’ APIs available on Azure infrastructure; both generative models like GPT-3 and embedding models like Ada. For each scenario, you’ll find an end-to-end implementation with Python, using Streamlit as the frontend and the LangChain SDK to facilitate models' integration into your applications.By the end of this book, you’ll be well equipped to use the generative AI field and start using ChatGPT and OpenAI models’ APIs in your own projects.

Check Point Firewall Administration R81.10+. A practical guide to Check Point firewall deployment and administration

Vladimir Yakovlev, Dameon D. Welch

Check Point firewalls are the premiere firewalls, access control, and threat prevention appliances for physical and virtual infrastructures. With Check Point’s superior security, administrators can help maintain confidentiality, integrity, and the availability of their resources protected by firewalls and threat prevention devices. This hands-on guide covers everything you need to be fluent in using Check Point firewalls for your operations.This book familiarizes you with Check Point firewalls and their most common implementation scenarios, showing you how to deploy them from scratch. You will begin by following the deployment and configuration of Check Point products and advance to their administration for an organization. Once you’ve learned how to plan, prepare, and implement Check Point infrastructure components and grasped the fundamental principles of their operation, you’ll be guided through the creation and modification of access control policies of increasing complexity, as well as the inclusion of additional features. To run your routine operations infallibly, you’ll also learn how to monitor security logs and dashboards. Generating reports detailing current or historical traffic patterns and security incidents is also covered.By the end of this book, you'll have gained the knowledge necessary to implement and comfortably operate Check Point firewalls.

Asterisk 1.4 - The Professional's Guide. Implementing, Administering, and Consulting on Commercial IP Telephony Solutions

Colman Carpenter, David Duffett, Ian Plain, Nik Middleton, ...

Asterisk is the leading Open Source Telephony application and PBX software solution. It represents an effective, easy-to-administer, and accessible platform for running enterprise telephony requirements. The real world, however, offers numerous hurdles when running Asterisk in the commercial environment including call routing, resilience, or integrating Asterisk with other systems. This book will show you some of the ways to overcome these problems.As the follow-up to Packt's highly successful 2005 title Building Telephony Systems with Asterisk, this book presents the collected wisdom of Asterisk Professionals in the commercial environment.Aimed at Administrators and Asterisk Consultants who are comfortable with the basics of Asterisk operation and installation, this book covers numerous hands-on topics such as Call Routing, Network Considerations, Scalability, and Resilience ñ all the while providing practical solutions and suggestions. It also covers more business-related areas like Billing Solutions and a Winning Sales Technique. Even if your interest or experience with Asterisk is lower level, this book will provide a deeper understanding of how Asterisk operates in the real world.Asterisk is deployed across countless enterprises globally. Running on Linux, it has constantly demonstrated its resilience, stability, and scalability and is now the advanced communication solution of choice to many organizations and consultants.With a foreword from Mark Spencer, the man behind Asterisk, this book presents the accumulated wisdom of three leading Asterisk Consultants and shows the reader how to get the most out of Asterisk in the commercial environment. Over the course of eleven chapters, this book introduces the reader to topics as diverse as Advanced Dial Plans, Network Considerations, and Call Routing, through to Localization, DAHDI, Speech Technology, and Working with a GUI. The book also covers the more nebulous aspects of being an Asterisk professional such as evaluating customer requirements and pitching for contracts.This book represents the wisdom and thoughts of front line consultants. The knowledge they impart will prove informative, thought provoking and be of lasting interest to Asterisk professionals.

Extreme C. Taking you to the limit in Concurrency, OOP, and the most advanced capabilities of C

Kamran Amini

There’s a lot more to C than knowing the language syntax. The industry looks for developers with a rigorous, scientific understanding of the principles and practices. Extreme C will teach you to use C’s advanced low-level power to write effective, efficient systems. This intensive, practical guide will help you become an expert C programmer.Building on your existing C knowledge, you will master preprocessor directives, macros, conditional compilation, pointers, and much more. You will gain new insight into algorithm design, functions, and structures. You will discover how C helps you squeeze maximum performance out of critical, resource-constrained applications.C still plays a critical role in 21st-century programming, remaining the core language for precision engineering, aviations, space research, and more. This book shows how C works with Unix, how to implement OO principles in C, and fully covers multi-processing.In Extreme C, Amini encourages you to think, question, apply, and experiment for yourself. The book is essential for anybody who wants to take their C to the next level.

Creating Interfaces with Bulma. Create impressive web interfaces with this open-source Flexbox-based CSS framework

Jeremy Thomas, Oleksii Potiekhin, Mikko Lauhakari, Aslam Shah, ...

Bulma is a lightweight configurable CSS framework that handles all the hard work of Flexbox for you. Bulma makes creating web interfaces an easy and interesting job.This book begins with an overview of the basics of Bulma ? its terms and its concepts. Then, while designing a login page for your application, you’ll learn how to use the various tools provided by Bulma to create HTML forms and control their layout and flow. In the later chapters, you’ll design an admin area for your application, thus learning to use Bulma’s navigation and menu components. You will also add the components to your user interface for common things such as boxes, lists, and media groups, and then create pagination. As you progress through the book, you’ll create and layout some other components for your interface, including tables, design dropdown lists, and finally to integrate your web application with JavaScript. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to use the features of Bulma to your advantage and build web interfaces quickly and easily.

Parallel Programming with Python. Develop efficient parallel systems using the robust Python environment

Jan Palach, Jan Palach V Cruz da Silva

Data Visualization: a successful design process

Andy Kirk, Andy Kirk

Do you want to create more attractive charts? Or do you have huge data sets and need to unearth the key insights in a visual manner? Data visualization is the representation and presentation of data, using proven design techniques to bring alive the patterns, stories and key insights locked away.Data Visualization: a Successful Design Process explores the unique fusion of art and science that is data visualization; a discipline for which instinct alone is insufficient for you to succeed in enabling audiences to discover key trends, insights and discoveries from your data. This book will equip you with the key techniques required to overcome contemporary data visualization challenges. You'll discover a proven design methodology that helps you develop invaluable knowledge and practical capabilities.You'll never again settle for a default Excel chart or resort to fancy-looking graphs. You will be able to work from the starting point of acquiring, preparing and familiarizing with your data, right through to concept design. Choose your killer visual representation to engage and inform your audience.Data Visualization: a Successful Design Process will inspire you to relish any visualization project with greater confidence and bullish know-how; turning challenges into exciting design opportunities.

An Atypical ASP.NET Core 5 Design Patterns Guide. A SOLID adventure into architectural principles, design patterns, .NET 5, and C#

Carl-Hugo Marcotte, Abdelhamid Zebdi

Design patterns are a set of solutions to many of the common problems occurring in software development. Knowledge of these design patterns helps developers and professionals to craft software solutions of any scale.ASP.NET Core 5 Design Patterns starts by exploring basic design patterns, architectural principles, dependency injection, and other ASP.NET Core mechanisms. You’ll explore the component scale as you discover patterns oriented toward small chunks of the software, and then move to application-scale patterns and techniques to understand higher-level patterns and how to structure the application as a whole. The book covers a range of significant GoF (Gangs of Four) design patterns such as strategy, singleton, decorator, facade, and composite. The chapters are organized based on scale and topics, allowing you to start small and build on a strong base, the same way that you would develop a program. With the help of use cases, the book will show you how to combine design patterns to display alternate usage and help you feel comfortable working with a variety of design patterns. Finally, you’ll advance to the client side to connect the dots and make ASP.NET Core a viable full-stack alternative.By the end of the book, you’ll be able to mix and match design patterns and have learned how to think about architecture and how it works.

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Guide. Build your cloud computing knowledge and build your skills as an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C01)

Rajesh Daswani

Amazon Web Services is the largest cloud computing service provider in the world. Its foundational certification, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C01), is the first step to fast-tracking your career in cloud computing. This certification will add value even to those in non-IT roles, including professionals from sales, legal, and finance who may be working with cloud computing or AWS projects. If you are a seasoned IT professional, this certification will make it easier for you to prepare for more technical certifications to progress up the AWS ladder and improve your career prospects.The book is divided into four parts. The first part focuses on the fundamentals of cloud computing and the AWS global infrastructure. The second part examines key AWS technology services, including compute, network, storage, and database services. The third part covers AWS security, the shared responsibility model, and several security tools. In the final part, you'll study the fundamentals of cloud economics and AWS pricing models and billing practices.Complete with exercises that highlight best practices for designing solutions, detailed use cases for each of the AWS services, quizzes, and two complete practice tests, this CLF-C01 exam study guide will help you gain the knowledge and hands-on experience necessary to ace the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam.

Mastering Cross-Platform Development with Xamarin. Master the skills required to steer cross-platform applications from drawing board to app store(s) using Xamarin

Can Bilgin, Miljenko Cvjetko, Paulo Ortins, Robert Hellestrae, ...

The main goal of this book is to equip you with the required know-how to successfully analyze, develop, and manage Xamarin cross-platform projects using the most efficient, robust, and scalable implementation patterns.This book starts with general topics such as memory management, asynchronous programming, local storage, and networking, and later moves onto platform-specific features. During this transition, you will learn about key tools to leverage the patterns described, as well as advanced implementation strategies and features. The book also presents User Interface design and implementation concepts on Android and iOS platforms from a Xamarin and cross-platform perspective, with the goal to create a consistent but native UI experience.Finally, we show you the toolset for application lifecycle management to help you prepare the development pipeline to manage and see cross-platform projects through to public or private release.

Drupal 7 Social Networking. Build a social or community website with friends lists, groups, custom user profiles, and much more

MICHAEL KEITH PEACOCK, Dries Buytaert

Drupal is ideally equipped to serve as a base system for creating a custom social networking site like Facebook or MySpace. While these large social networks have their place, niche social networking websites can help promote businesses, products, projects, and hobbies of any nature.Drupal 7 Social Networking provides careful instructions and clear explanations to take you through the setup and management of your social network site, covering topics from users, to marketing, to maintenance. It will help you create your own social networking site, suitable for whatever audience you choose!Starting from the very basics of both Drupal and Social Networking, right through to more complicated aspects, you will progressively learn how to add to and expand your social networking site and add more features. You will learn how to secure your social network, deploy it on the Internet, and keep it running and well maintained. As social networking sites rely on the participation of their users, this book helps you to structure your site in such a way so that users can easily and enjoyably contribute, thus creating a powerful social network.

Unreal Engine 5 Character Creation, Animation, and Cinematics. Create custom 3D assets and bring them to life in Unreal Engine 5 using MetaHuman, Lumen, and Nanite

Henk Venter, Wilhelm Ogterop

Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) offers beginners and seasoned professionals the ability to create detailed movie scenes with realistic human characters using MetaHuman and combine it with custom props and environments. It also comes with built-in industry standard animation tools to develop such scenes in a fraction of the time compared to old methods. This book takes you through the entire 3D movie production pipeline using free (open - source) software.By following the step-by-step, beginner-friendly tutorials in this book, you'll learn how to create your own custom 3D assets in Blender and texture these 3D assets in Quixel Mixer. Next, you'll take these completed 3D assets into Unreal Engine 5 and use them to build a virtual 3D movie set for your 3D movie. You'll also populate your 3D movie set by using Quixel MegaScans assets and create and customize your own photorealistic human character using MetaHuman Creator and UE5. As you advance, you'll discover how to rig, skin, and animate these 3D assets and characters using Blender and UE5's new Control Rig. Finally, you'll explore the process of setting up your movie cameras and animation sequences and rendering your 3D movie using UE5's Sequencer.By the end of this Unreal Engine book, you'll have learned how to combine different elements in UE5 to make your own movies and cinematics.

Mastering Unit Testing Using Mockito and JUnit. An advanced guide to mastering unit testing using Mockito and JUnit

Sujoy Acharya

Redis Essentials. Harness the power of Redis to integrate and manage your projects efficiently

Fredrik Sandell, Alexander Myltsev, Javier de la Rosa, Rodrigo Martin, ...

Redis is the most popular in-memory key-value data store. It's very lightweight and its data types give it an edge over the other competitors. If you need an in-memory database or a high-performance cache system that is simple to use and highly scalable, Redis is what you need.Redis Essentials is a fast-paced guide that teaches the fundamentals on data types, explains how to manage data through commands, and shares experiences from big players in the industry.We start off by explaining the basics of Redis followed by the various data types such as Strings, hashes, lists, and more. Next, Common pitfalls for various scenarios are described, followed by solutions to ensure you do not fall into common traps.After this, major differences between client implementations in PHP, Python, and Ruby are presented. Next, you will learn how to extend Redis with Lua, get to know security techniques such as basic authorization, firewall rules, and SSL encryption, and discover how to use Twemproxy, Redis Sentinel, and Redis Cluster to scale infrastructures horizontally. At the end of this book, you will be able to utilize all the essential features of Redis to optimize your project's performance.

JBoss Tools 3 Developers Guide. Develop JSF, Struts, Seam, Hibernate, jBPM, ESB, web services, and portal applications faster than ever using JBoss Tools for Eclipse and the JBoss Application Server

Anghel Leonard, Jason Savod

JBoss Tools consist of the best Java frameworks and technologies placed together under the same roof. Discovering JBoss Tools is like exploring a cave; at first everything seems unknown and complicated, but once you become familiar with the main features of the Tools, you will start to feel at home.This is the first book in the market on JBoss Tools, waiting to assist you to throw away all the tiny, dedicated tools you have used earlier, thus helping you to reduce the time you spend on developing a Java application. This book will explore the tools that will help you to build Hibernate, Seam, JSF, Struts, Web Services, jBPM, ESB, and so on and show you how to use them through screenshots, examples, and source code. JBoss Tools comes with a set of dedicated wizards, generators, editors, reverse engineering capabilities, configuration files, templates, syntax highlighting, and more for each of these technologies. Just choose the technologies, and JBoss Tools will glue them together in amazing Java web applications.This book will show you how to develop a set of Java projects using a variety of technologies and scenarios. Everything is described through JBoss Tools eyes. After we settle the project (or scenario) that will be developed, we configure the proper environment for the current tool (the selected projects cover the main components of a web application, with regard to the backstage technology). We continue by exploring the tool to accomplish our tasks and develop the project's components. A cocktail of images, theoretical aspects, source code, and step-by-step examples will offer you a complete insight into every tool.At the end, we deploy and test the project. In addition, every chapter is rich with pure notions about the underlying technology, which will initiate into you or remind you of the basic aspects of it. It will also show you complete and functional applications, and get you familiar with the main aspects of every tool. By the end you will have enough information to successfully handle your own projects with JBoss Tools.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations. Deliver profitable projects with effective project planning and productive operational workflows

Robert Houdeshell

Dynamics 365 Project Operations is a game-changing solution set for project-driven businesses that allows you to deliver commercially successful projects in a timely and cost-effective manner, keeping the project teams productive and collaborative. With this book, you'll find out how you can bring more value to the business by winning new projects and driving exponential revenue growth.Starting with the key principles of Project Operations, you'll understand how it improves project planning and execution. You’ll then learn how to successfully deploy Project Operations along with different integration strategies and get to grips with the best approach for sales through project opportunities, project contracts, and pricing workflow implementation. This book will guide you through setting up direct staffing and centralized staffing models and enable you to manage project changes confidently by getting hands-on with project timeline management, pricing management, resource assignments, and modifications. In the final chapters, you'll find out how to use Project Operations effectively for project accounting and finance.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the confidence to deliver profitable projects in a well-connected organization through efficient decision-making and successful customer-client relationships.

Refactoring TypeScript. Keeping your code healthy

James Hickey

Refactoring improves your code without changing its behavior. With refactoring, the best approach is to apply small targeted changes to a codebase. Instead of doing a huge sweeping change to your code, refactoring is better as a long-term and continuous enterprise. Refactoring TypeScript explains how to spot bugs and remove them from your code.You’ll start by seeing how wordy conditionals, methods, and null checks make code unhealthy and unstable. Whether it is identifying messy nested conditionals or removing unnecessary methods, this book will show various techniques to avoid these pitfalls and write code that is easier to understand, maintain, and test.By the end of the book, you’ll have learned some of the main causes of unhealthy code, tips to identify them and techniques to address them.

Spark for Data Science. Click here to enter text

Srinivas Duvvuri, Bikramaditya Singhal

This is the era of Big Data. The words ‘Big Data’ implies big innovation and enables a competitive advantage for businesses. Apache Spark was designed to perform Big Data analytics at scale, and so Spark is equipped with the necessary algorithms and supports multiple programming languages.Whether you are a technologist, a data scientist, or a beginner to Big Data analytics, this book will provide you with all the skills necessary to perform statistical data analysis, data visualization, predictive modeling, and build scalable data products or solutions using Python, Scala, and R.With ample case studies and real-world examples, Spark for Data Science will help you ensure the successful execution of your data science projects.

Metaprogramming in C#. Automate your .NET development and simplify overcomplicated code

Einar Ingebrigtsen

Metaprogramming is an advanced technique that helps developers to automate repetitive tasks, generate scalable code, and enhance productivity in software development. Metaprogramming in C# is a comprehensive guide that will help you reap the full potential of metaprogramming in .NET runtime.You’ll start by learning about the .NET runtime environment and how you can use it to become a more productive developer. You'll learn how to infer types using reflection, use attributes, and create dynamic proxies. You’ll also explore the use of expressions to create and execute code and how to take advantage of Dynamic Language Runtime.But that's not all! You’ll also learn to go beyond inheritance and use method signature conventions to create easily maintainable code. Finally, you’ll dive into the world of compiler magic with Roslyn, where you'll discover how to use Roslyn to generate code, perform static code analysis, and write your own compiler extensions.By the end of this book, you’ll have a deep understanding of metaprogramming concepts and how to apply them to your C# code. You’ll be able to think about types, use attributes and expressions to generate code, and apply crosscutting concerns to improve code quality.

Applied Supervised Learning with R. Use machine learning libraries of R to build models that solve business problems and predict future trends

Karthik Ramasubramanian, Jojo Moolayil

R provides excellent visualization features that are essential for exploring data before using it in automated learning.Applied Supervised Learning with R helps you cover the complete process of employing R to develop applications using supervised machine learning algorithms for your business needs. The book starts by helping you develop your analytical thinking to create a problem statement using business inputs and domain research. You will then learn different evaluation metrics that compare various algorithms, and later progress to using these metrics to select the best algorithm for your problem. After finalizing the algorithm you want to use, you will study the hyperparameter optimization technique to fine-tune your set of optimal parameters. The book demonstrates how you can add different regularization terms to avoid overfitting your model.By the end of this book, you will have gained the advanced skills you need for modeling a supervised machine learning algorithm that precisely fulfills your business needs.

Python Tools for Visual Studio. Leverage the power of the Visual Studio IDE to develop better and more efficient Python projects

Martino A Sabia, Jia Shuan Cathy Wang

Mastering CryENGINE. Raise your CryENGINE capabilities even higher with this superb guide. It will take you into a world of advanced features and amazing possibilities, teaching best practices and Lua scripting for sophisticated gameplay along the way

Michelle Martin