SQL Server 2017 Integration Services Cookbook. Powerful ETL techniques to load and transform data from almost any source

Christian Cote, Dejan Sarka, David Peter Hansen, Matija Lah, ...

SQL Server Integration Services is a tool that facilitates data extraction, consolidation, and loading options (ETL), SQL Server coding enhancements, data warehousing, and customizations. With the help of the recipes in this book, you’ll gain complete hands-on experience of SSIS 2017 as well as the 2016 new features, design and development improvements including SCD, Tuning, and Customizations.At the start, you’ll learn to install and set up SSIS as well other SQL Server resources to make optimal use of this Business Intelligence tools. We’ll begin by taking you through the new features in SSIS 2016/2017 and implementing the necessary features to get a modern scalable ETL solution that fits the modern data warehouse. Through the course of chapters, you will learn how to design and build SSIS data warehouses packages using SQL Server Data Tools. Additionally, you’ll learn to develop SSIS packages designed to maintain a data warehouse using the Data Flow and other control flow tasks. You’ll also be demonstrated many recipes on cleansing data and how to get the end result after applying different transformations. Some real-world scenarios that you might face are also covered and how to handle various issues that you might face when designing your packages.At the end of this book, you’ll get to know all the key concepts to perform data integration and transformation. You’ll have explored on-premises Big Data integration processes to create a classic data warehouse, and will know how to extend the toolbox with custom tasks and transforms.

Java Data Science Cookbook. Explore the power of MLlib, DL4j, Weka, and more

Rushdi Shams

If you are looking to build data sciencemodels that are good for production,Java has come to the rescue. With the aidof strong libraries such as MLlib, Weka,DL4j, and more, you can efficientlyperform all the data science tasks youneed to.This unique book provides modernrecipes to solve your common andnot-so-common data science-relatedproblems. We start with recipes to helpyou obtain, clean, index, and search data.Then you will learn a variety of techniquesto analyze, learn from, and retrieveinformation from data. You will alsounderstand how to handle big data, learndeeply from data, and visualize data.Finally, you will work through uniquerecipes that solve your problems whiletaking data science to production, writingdistributed data science applications,and much more - things that will come inhandy at work.

Mastering OpenCV 3. Get hands-on with practical Computer Vision using OpenCV 3 - Second Edition

Shervin Emami, David Millán Escrivá, Daniel Lelis Baggio, Roy Shilkrot, ...

As we become more capable of handling data in every kind, we are becoming more reliant on visual input and what we can do with those self-driving cars, face recognition, and even augmented reality applications and games. This is all powered by Computer Vision.This book will put you straight to work in creating powerful and unique computer vision applications. Each chapter is structured around a central project and deep dives into an important aspect of OpenCV such as facial recognition, image target tracking, making augmented reality applications, the 3D visualization framework, and machine learning. You’ll learn how to make AI that can remember and use neural networks to help your applications learn.By the end of the book, you will have created various working prototypes with the projects in the book and will be well versed with the new features of OpenCV3.

Practical Site Reliability Engineering. Automate the process of designing, developing, and delivering highly reliable apps and services with SRE

Pethuru Raj Chelliah, Shreyash Naithani, Shailender Singh

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is being touted as the most competent paradigm in establishing and ensuring next-generation high-quality software solutions.This book starts by introducing you to the SRE paradigm and covers the need for highly reliable IT platforms and infrastructures. As you make your way through the next set of chapters, you will learn to develop microservices using Spring Boot and make use of RESTful frameworks. You will also learn about GitHub for deployment, containerization, and Docker containers. Practical Site Reliability Engineering teaches you to set up and sustain containerized cloud environments, and also covers architectural and design patterns and reliability implementation techniques such as reactive programming, and languages such as Ballerina and Rust. In the concluding chapters, you will get well-versed with service mesh solutions such as Istio and Linkerd, and understand service resilience test practices, API gateways, and edge/fog computing.By the end of this book, you will have gained experience on working with SRE concepts and be able to deliver highly reliable apps and services.

Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming. Add powerful, believable, and fun AI entities in your game with the power of Unity 2018! - Fourth Edition

Dr. Davide Aversa, Aung Sithu Kyaw, Clifford Peters

Developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for game characters in Unity 2018 has never been easier. Unity provides game and app developers with a variety of tools to implement AI, from the basic techniques to cutting-edge machine learning-powered agents. Leveraging these tools via Unity's API or built-in features allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating your game's worlds and characters.This fourth edition with Unity will help you break down AI into simple concepts to give you a fundamental understanding of the topic to build upon. Using a variety of examples, the book then takes those concepts and walks you through actual implementations designed to highlight key concepts and features related to game AI in Unity.Further on, you'll learn how to distinguish the state machine pattern and implement one of your own. This is followed by learning how to implement a basic sensory system for your AI agent and coupling it with a Finite State Machine (FSM).Next, you'll learn how to use Unity's built-in NavMesh feature and implement your own A* pathfinding system. You'll then learn how to implement simple ?ocks and crowd dynamics, which are key AI concepts in Unity. Moving on, you'll learn how to implement a behavior tree through a game-focused example. Lastly, you'll apply all the concepts in the book to build a popular game.

Learning PowerShell DSC. Automate deployment and configuration of your servers - Second Edition

James Pogran

The main goal of this book is to teach you to configure, deploy, and manage your system using the new features of PowerShell v5/v6 DSC.This book begins with the basics of PowerShell Desired State Configuration, covering its architecture and components. It familiarizes you with the set of Windows PowerShell language extensions and new Windows PowerShell commands that make up DSC. Then it helps you create DSC custom resources and work with DSC configurations with the help of practical examples. Finally, it describes how to deploy configuration data using PowerShell DSC. Throughout this book, we will be focusing on concepts such as building configurations with parameters, the local configuration manager, and testing and restoring configurations using PowerShell DSC.By the end of the book, you will be able to deploy a real-world application end-to-end and will be familiar enough with the powerful Desired State Configuration platform to achieve continuous delivery and efficiently and easily manage and deploy data for systems.

Apache Spark 2.x Cookbook. Over 70 cloud-ready recipes for distributed Big Data processing and analytics

Rishi Yadav

While Apache Spark 1.x gained a lot of traction and adoption in the early years, Spark 2.x delivers notable improvements in the areas of API, schema awareness, Performance, Structured Streaming, and simplifying building blocks to build better, faster, smarter, and more accessible big data applications. This book uncovers all these features in the form of structured recipes to analyze and mature large and complex sets of data.Starting with installing and configuring Apache Spark with various cluster managers, you will learn to set up development environments. Further on, you will be introduced to working with RDDs, DataFrames and Datasets to operate on schema aware data, and real-time streaming with various sources such as Twitter Stream and Apache Kafka. You will also work through recipes on machine learning, including supervised learning, unsupervised learning & recommendation engines in Spark.Last but not least, the final few chapters delve deeper into the concepts of graph processing using GraphX, securing your implementations, cluster optimization, and troubleshooting.

D3.js 4.x Data Visualization. Learn to visualize your data with JavaScript - Third Edition

Aendrew Rininsland, Swizec Teller

Want to get started with impressive interactive visualizations and implement them in your daily tasks? This book offers the perfect solution-D3.js. It has emerged as the most popular tool for data visualization. This book will teach you how to implement the features of the latest version of D3 while writing JavaScript using the newest tools and techniqueYou will start by setting up the D3 environment and making your first basic bar chart. You will then build stunning SVG and Canvas-based data visualizations while writing testable, extensible code,as accurate and informative as it is visually stimulating. Step-by-step examples walk you through creating, integrating, and debugging different types of visualization and will have you building basic visualizations (such as bar, line, and scatter graphs) in no time.By the end of this book, you will have mastered the techniques necessary to successfully visualize data and will be ready to use D3 to transform any data into an engaging and sophisticated visualization.

Hands-On Unsupervised Learning with Python. Implement machine learning and deep learning models using Scikit-Learn, TensorFlow, and more

Giuseppe Bonaccorso

Unsupervised learning is about making use of raw, untagged data and applying learning algorithms to it to help a machine predict its outcome. With this book, you will explore the concept of unsupervised learning to cluster large sets of data and analyze them repeatedly until the desired outcome is found using Python.This book starts with the key differences between supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised learning. You will be introduced to the best-used libraries and frameworks from the Python ecosystem and address unsupervised learning in both the machine learning and deep learning domains. You will explore various algorithms, techniques that are used to implement unsupervised learning in real-world use cases. You will learn a variety of unsupervised learning approaches, including randomized optimization, clustering, feature selection and transformation, and information theory. You will get hands-on experience with how neural networks can be employed in unsupervised scenarios. You will also explore the steps involved in building and training a GAN in order to process images.By the end of this book, you will have learned the art of unsupervised learning for different real-world challenges.

Learning Robotic Process Automation. Create Software robots and automate business processes with the leading RPA tool – UiPath

Alok Mani Tripathi

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) enables automating business processes using software robots. Software robots interpret, trigger responses, and communicate with other systems just like humans do. Robotic processes and intelligent automation tools can help businesses improve the effectiveness of services faster and at a lower cost than current methods.This book is the perfect start to your automation journey, with a special focus on one of the most popular RPA tools: UiPath.Learning Robotic Process Automation takes you on a journey from understanding the basics of RPA to advanced implementation techniques. You will become familiar with the UiPath interface and learn about its workflow. Once you are familiar with the environment, we will get hands-on with automating applications such as Excel, SAP, Windows and web applications, screen and web scraping, working with user events, and we'll cover exceptions and debugging. By the end of the book, you'll not only be able to build your first software robot, but you'll also wire it up to perform various automation tasks with the help of best practices for robot deployment.

Python Deep Learning Projects. 9 projects demystifying neural network and deep learning models for building intelligent systems

Matthew Lamons, Rahul Kumar, Abhishek Nagaraja

Deep learning has been gradually revolutionizing every field of artificial intelligence, making application development easier.Python Deep Learning Projects imparts all the knowledge needed to implement complex deep learning projects in the field of computational linguistics and computer vision. Each of these projects is unique, helping you progressively master the subject. You’ll learn how to implement a text classifier system using a recurrent neural network (RNN) model and optimize it to understand the shortcomings you might experience while implementing a simple deep learning system.Similarly, you’ll discover how to develop various projects, including word vector representation, open domain question answering, and building chatbots using seq-to-seq models and language modeling. In addition to this, you’ll cover advanced concepts, such as regularization, gradient clipping, gradient normalization, and bidirectional RNNs, through a series of engaging projects.By the end of this book, you will have gained knowledge to develop your own deep learning systems in a straightforward way and in an efficient way

Mastering Arduino. A project-based approach to electronics, circuits, and programming

Jon Hoffman

Mastering Arduino is an all-in-one guide to getting the most out of your Arduino. This practical, no-nonsense guide teaches you all of the electronics and programming skills that you need to create advanced Arduino projects. This book is packed full of real-world projects for you to practice on, bringing all of the knowledge in the book together and giving you the skills to build your own robot from the examples in this book. The final two chapters discuss wireless technologies and how they can be used in your projects. The book begins with the basics of electronics, making sure that you understand components, circuits, and prototyping before moving on. It then performs the same function for code, getting you into the Arduino IDE and showing you how to connect the Arduino to a computer and run simple projects on your Arduino.Once the basics are out of the way, the next 10 chapters of the book focus on small projects centered around particular components, such as LCD displays, stepper motors, or voice synthesizers. Each of these chapters will get you familiar with the technology involved, how to build with it, how to program it, and how it can be used in your own projects.

Machine Learning with scikit-learn Quick Start Guide. Classification, regression, and clustering techniques in Python

Kevin Jolly

Scikit-learn is a robust machine learning library for the Python programming language. It provides a set of supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms. This book is the easiest way to learn how to deploy, optimize, and evaluate all of the important machine learning algorithms that scikit-learn provides.This book teaches you how to use scikit-learn for machine learning. You will start by setting up and configuring your machine learning environment with scikit-learn. To put scikit-learn to use, you will learn how to implement various supervised and unsupervised machine learning models. You will learn classification, regression, and clustering techniques to work with different types of datasets and train your models.Finally, you will learn about an effective pipeline to help you build a machine learning project from scratch. By the end of this book, you will be confident in building your own machine learning models for accurate predictions.

Raspberry Pi 3 Home Automation Projects. Bringing your home to life using Raspberry Pi 3, Arduino, and ESP8266

Shantanu Bhadoria, Ruben Oliva Ramos

Raspberry Pi 3 Home Automation Projects addresses the challenge of applying real-world projects to automate your house using Raspberry Pi 3 and Arduino. You will learn how to customize and program the Raspberry Pi 3 and Arduino-based boards in several home automation projects around your house.This book aims to help you integrate different microcontrollers like Arduino, ESP8266 Wi-Fi module, Particle Photon and Raspberry Pi 3 into the real world, taking the best of these boards to develop some exciting home automation projects. We will start with an interesting project creating a Raspberry Pi Powered smart mirror and move on to Automated Gardening System, which will help you build a simple smart gardening to keep your garden healthy with minimal effort. You will also learn to build projects such as CheerLights into a holiday display, a project to erase parking headaches with OpenCV and Raspberry Pi 3, create Netfl ix's The Switch for the living room and lock down your house like Fort Knox with a Windows IoT face recognition-based door lock system.By the end of the book, you will be able to build and automate the living space with intriguing IoT projects and bring a new degree of inter connectivity to your world.

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing. Secure your network with Kali Linux – the ultimate white hat hackers' toolkit - Second Edition

Vijay Kumar Velu

This book will take you, as a tester or security practitioner through the journey of reconnaissance, vulnerability assessment, exploitation, and post-exploitation activities used by penetration testers and hackers. We will start off by using a laboratory environment to validate tools and techniques, and using an application that supports a collaborative approach to penetration testing. Further we will get acquainted with passive reconnaissance with open source intelligence and active reconnaissance of the external and internal networks. We will also focus on how to select, use, customize, and interpret the results from a variety of different vulnerability scanners. Specific routes to the target will also be examined, including bypassing physical security and exfiltration of data using different techniques. You will also get to grips with concepts such as social engineering, attacking wireless networks, exploitation of web applications and remote access connections. Later you will learn the practical aspects of attacking user client systems by backdooring executable files. You will focus on the most vulnerable part of the network—directly and bypassing the controls, attacking the end user and maintaining persistence access through social media.You will also explore approaches to carrying out advanced penetration testing in tightly secured environments, and the book's hands-on approach will help you understand everything you need to know during a Red teaming exercise or penetration testing

Python Machine Learning By Example. Implement machine learning algorithms and techniques to build intelligent systems - Second Edition

Yuxi (Hayden) Liu

The surge in interest in machine learning (ML) is due to the fact that it revolutionizes automation by learning patterns in data and using them to make predictions and decisions. If you’re interested in ML, this book will serve as your entry point to ML.Python Machine Learning By Example begins with an introduction to important ML concepts and implementations using Python libraries. Each chapter of the book walks you through an industry adopted application. You’ll implement ML techniques in areas such as exploratory data analysis, feature engineering, and natural language processing (NLP) in a clear and easy-to-follow way.With the help of this extended and updated edition, you’ll understand how to tackle data-driven problems and implement your solutions with the powerful yet simple Python language and popular Python packages and tools such as TensorFlow, scikit-learn, gensim, and Keras. To aid your understanding of popular ML algorithms, the book covers interesting and easy-to-follow examples such as news topic modeling and classification, spam email detection, stock price forecasting, and more.By the end of the book, you’ll have put together a broad picture of the ML ecosystem and will be well-versed with the best practices of applying ML techniques to make the most out of new opportunities.

Voicebot and Chatbot Design. Flexible conversational interfaces with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Facebook Messenger

Rachel Batish

We are entering the age of conversational interfaces, where we will interact with AI bots using chat and voice. But how do we create a good conversation? How do we design and build voicebots and chatbots that can carry successful conversations in in the real world?In this book, Rachel Batish introduces us to the world of conversational applications, bots and AI. You’ll discover how - with little technical knowledge - you can build successful and meaningful conversational UIs. You’ll find detailed guidance on how to build and deploy bots on the leading conversational platforms, including Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Facebook Messenger.You’ll then learn key design aspects for building conversational UIs that will really succeed and shine in front of humans. You’ll discover how your AI bots can become part of a meaningful conversation with humans, using techniques such as persona shaping, and tone analysis.For successful bots in the real world, you’ll explore important use-cases and examples where humans interact with bots. With examples across finance, travel, and e-commerce, you’ll see how you can create successful conversational UIs in any sector.Expand your horizons further as Rachel shares with you her insights into cutting-edge voicebot and chatbot technologies, and how the future might unfold. Join in right now and start building successful, high impact bots!

Hands-On Internet of Things with Blynk. Build on the power of Blynk to configure smart devices and build exciting IoT projects

Pradeeka Seneviratne

Blynk, known as the most user-friendly IoT platform, provides a way to build mobile applications in minutes. With the Blynk drag-n-drop mobile app builder, anyone can build amazing IoT applications with minimal resources and effort, on hardware ranging from prototyping platforms such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi 3 to industrial-grade ESP8266, Intel, Sierra Wireless, Particle, Texas Instruments, and a few others.This book uses Raspberry Pi as the main hardware platform and C/C++ to write sketches to build projects. The first part of this book shows how to set up a development environment with various hardware combinations and required software. Then you will build your first IoT application with Blynk using various hardware combinations and connectivity types such as Ethernet and Wi-Fi. Then you'll use and configure various widgets (control, display, notification, interface, time input, and some advanced widgets) with Blynk App Builder to build applications. Towards the end, you will learn how to connect with and use built-in sensors on Android and iOS mobile devices. Finally you will learn how to build a robot that can be controlled with a Blynk app through the Blynk cloud and personal server.By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience building IoT applications using Blynk.

Drupal 8 Quick Start Guide. Get up and running with Drupal 8

J. Ayen Green

Drupal is a powerful content management platform, ?exible enough to accommodate almost any content requirements. This ?exibility comes with a cost: complexity. Drupal 8 Quick Start Guide will clear your path from installation to a building usable site in minutes, and to a customized site in one sitting.You will begin with installation of Drupal and going through the main sections of the Drupal UI. Then, you will create a content type that describes its content, which simplifies the act of creating and editing the actual content later. You will learn about user roles, using real-world examples. This will help you to learn how to design roles, and how to assign appropriate permissions to them. Next, you will learn to use the WYSIWYG editor, configure it for other roles, navigate the various fields on the content creation form, and publish content.To begin to appreciate the ?exibility and expandability of Drupal, you will make use of popular content-focused modules that extend Drupal's power. You will learn how to expand your market to other readers directly and through other sites by configuring content and UI translations and creating a View that provides an RSS feed. Finally, you will put everything together by customizing the home page for your new website.

Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices. Design, develop, and deploy highly adaptable, scalable, and secure RESTful web APIs

Harihara Subramanian J, Pethuru Raj

This book deals with the Representational State Transfer (REST) paradigm, which is an architectural style that allows networked devices to communicate with each other over the internet. With the help of this book, you’ll explore the concepts of service-oriented architecture (SOA), event-driven architecture (EDA), and resource-oriented architecture (ROA). This book covers why there is an insistence for high-quality APIs toward enterprise integration.It also covers how to optimize and explore endpoints for microservices with API gateways and touches upon integrated platforms and Hubs for RESTful APIs. You’ll also understand how application delivery and deployments can be simplified and streamlined in the REST world. The book will help you dig deeper into the distinct contributions of RESTful services for IoT analytics and applications.Besides detailing the API design and development aspects, this book will assist you in designing and developing production-ready, testable, sustainable, and enterprise-grade APIs. By the end of the book, you’ll be empowered with all that you need to create highly flexible APIs for next-generation RESTful services and applications.

Vue.js 2 Design Patterns and Best Practices. Build enterprise-ready, modular Vue.js applications with Vuex and Nuxt

Paul Halliday

Vue.js 2 Design Patterns and Best Practices starts by comparing Vue.js with other frameworks and setting up the development environment for your application, and gradually moves on to writing and styling clean, maintainable, and reusable Vue.js components that can be used across your application. Further on, you'll look at common UI patterns, Vue form submission, and various modifiers such as lazy binding, number typecasting, and string trimming to create better UIs. You will also explore best practices for integrating HTTP into Vue.js applications to create an application with dynamic data. Routing is a vitally important part of any SPA, so you will focus on the vue-router and explore routing a user between multiple pages. Next, you'll also explore state management with Vuex, write testable code for your application, and create performant, server-side rendered applications with Nuxt. Toward the end, we'll look at common antipatterns to avoid, saving you from a lot of trial and error and development headaches.By the end of this book, you'll be on your way to becoming an expert Vue developer who can leverage design patterns to efficiently architect the design of your application and write clean and maintainable code.

Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V Cookbook. Save time and resources by getting to know the best practices and intelligence from industry experts - Second Edition

Charbel Nemnom, Patrick Lownds, Leandro Carvalho

Hyper-V 2016 is full of new features and updates. The second of our best-selling Hyper-V books, the Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V Cookbook has it all covered. Brimming with expert solutions and techniques, you?ll have everything you need to master virtualization and Hyper-V Manager. This Hyper-V book is designed to help advanced-level administrators benefit fully from the new Windows Server. With over 80 hands-on recipes, the Hyper-V Cookbook gives you tips, tricks and best practices to deploy, maintain and upgrade your virtual machines.

Go Web Scraping Quick Start Guide. Implement the power of Go to scrape and crawl data from the web

Vincent Smith

Web scraping is the process of extracting information from the web using various tools that perform scraping and crawling. Go is emerging as the language of choice for scraping using a variety of libraries. This book will quickly explain to you, how to scrape data data from various websites using Go libraries such as Colly and Goquery.The book starts with an introduction to the use cases of building a web scraper and the main features of the Go programming language, along with setting up a Go environment. It then moves on to HTTP requests and responses and talks about how Go handles them. You will also learn about a number of basic web scraping etiquettes.You will be taught how to navigate through a website, using a breadth-first and then a depth-first search, as well as find and follow links. You will get to know about the ways to track history in order to avoid loops and to protect your web scraper using proxies.Finally the book will cover the Go concurrency model, and how to run scrapers in parallel, along with large-scale distributed web scraping.

Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex. Create custom conversational and voice interfaces for your Amazon Echo devices and web platforms

Sam Williams

Have you ever wondered how Alexa apps are made, how voice-enabled technologies work, or how chatbots function? And why tech giants such as Amazon and Google are investing in voice technologies? A better question is: why should I start developing on these platforms? Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex covers all features of the Alexa Skills kit with real-world examples that help you develop skills to integrate Echo and chatbots into Facebook, Slack, and Twilio with the Amazon Lex platform.The book starts with teaching you how to set up your local environment and AWS CLI so that you can automate the process of uploading AWS Lambda from your local machine. You will then learn to develop Alexa Skills and Lex chatbots using Lambda functions to control functionality. Once you’ve come to grips with this, you will learn to create increasingly complex chatbots, integrate Amazon S3, and change the way Alexa talks to the user. In the concluding chapters, we shift our focus to Amazon Lex and messaging chatbots. We will explore Alexa, learn about DynamoDB databases, and add cards to user conversations.By the end of this book, you will have explored a full set of technologies that will enable you to create your own voice and messaging chatbots using Amazon.