GLSL Essentials. If you're involved in graphics programming, you need to know about shaders, and this is the book to do it. A hands-on guide to the OpenGL Shading Language, it walks you through the absolute basics to advanced techniques

Jacobo Rodriguez

Shader programming has been the largest revolution in graphics programming. OpenGL Shading Language (abbreviated: GLSL or GLslang), is a high-level shading language based on the syntax of the C programming language.With GLSL you can execute code on your GPU (aka graphics card). More sophisticated effects can be achieved with this technique.Therefore, knowing how OpenGL works and how each shader type interacts with each other, as well as how they are integrated into the system, is imperative for graphic programmers. This knowledge is crucial in order to be familiar with the mechanisms for rendering 3D objects.GLSL Essentials is the only book on the market that teaches you about shaders from the very beginning. It shows you how graphics programming has evolved, in order to understand why you need each stage in the Graphics Rendering Pipeline, and how to manage it in a simple but concise way. This book explains how shaders work in a step-by-step manner, with an explanation of how they interact with the application assets at each stage.This book will take you through the graphics pipeline and will describe each section in an interactive and clear way. You will learn how the OpenGL state machine works and all its relevant stages. Vertex shaders, fragment shaders, and geometry shaders will be covered, as well some use cases and an introduction to the math needed for lighting algorithms or transforms. Generic GPU programming (GPGPU) will also be covered.After reading GLSL Essentials you will be ready to generate any rendering effect you need.

Microsoft 365 Mobility and Security - Exam Guide MS-101. Explore threat management, governance, security, compliance, and device services in Microsoft 365

Nate Chamberlain

Exam MS-101: Microsoft 365 Mobility and Security is a part of the Microsoft 365 Certified: Enterprise Administrator Expert certification path designed to help users validate their skills in evaluating, planning, migrating, deploying, and managing Microsoft 365 services. This book will help you implement modern device services, apply Microsoft 365 security and threat management, and manage Microsoft 365 governance and compliance. Written in a succinct way, you’ll explore chapter-wise self-assessment questions, exam tips, and mock exams with answers.You’ll start by implementing mobile device management (MDM) and handling device compliance. You’ll delve into threat detection and management, learning how to manage security reports and configure Microsoft 365 alerts. Later, you’ll discover data loss prevention (DLP) tools to protect data as well as tools for configuring audit logs and policies. The book will also guide you through using Azure Information Protection (AIP) for deploying clients, applying policies, and configuring services and users to enhance data security. Finally, you’ll cover best practices for configuring settings across your tenant to ensure compliance and security.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned to work with Microsoft 365 services and covered the concepts and techniques you need to know to pass the MS-101 exam.

Software Test Design. Write comprehensive test plans to uncover critical bugs in web, desktop, and mobile apps

Simon Amey

Software Test Design details best practices for testing software applications and writing comprehensive test plans. Written by an expert with over twenty years of experience in the high-tech industry, this guide will provide you with training and practical examples to improve your testing skills.Thorough testing requires a thorough understanding of the functionality under test, informed by exploratory testing and described by a detailed functional specification. This audiobook is divided into three sections, the first of which will describe how best to complete those tasks to start testing from a solid foundation.Armed with the feature specification, functional testing verifies the visible behavior of features by identifying equivalence partitions, boundary values, and other key test conditions. This section explores techniques such as black- and white-box testing, trying error cases, finding security weaknesses, improving the user experience, and how to maintain your product in the long term.The final section describes how best to test the limits of your application. How does it behave under failure conditions and can it recover? What is the maximum load it can sustain? And how does it respond when overloaded?By the end of this audiobook, you will know how to write detailed test plans to improve the quality of your software applications.

Mobile DevOps Playbook. A practical guide for delivering high-quality mobile applications like a pro

Moataz Nabil

To build mobile apps, you need to understand mobile-first features, tools, and processes that help you build, test, and release robust apps faster and more efficiently. The multitude of challenges stemming from mobile development's inherent complexities, including native iOS and Android app creation, cross-platform frameworks, and the implementation of scalable architectures within extensive teams, collectively contribute to a substantial number of obstacles that can significantly prolong the release process.This book will help you understand and implement the best practices of mobile DevOps for continuous integration, testing, delivery, deployment, and monitoring. You’ll explore different challenges faced by developers due to varied OSs, the unforgiving nature of mobile applications, and continuous updates to mobile phones and learn how to maneuver through these challenges. You’ll also get to grips with the latest trends while discovering the potential future of mobile DevOps, with valuable insights and guidance about integrating mobile development teams into your organization.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to successfully implement mobile DevOps and build fast, qualitative, and efficient mobile apps for your team or organization.

Hands-On Reinforcement Learning for Games. Implementing self-learning agents in games using artificial intelligence techniques

Micheal Lanham

With the increased presence of AI in the gaming industry, developers are challenged to create highly responsive and adaptive games by integrating artificial intelligence into their projects. This book is your guide to learning how various reinforcement learning techniques and algorithms play an important role in game development with Python.Starting with the basics, this book will help you build a strong foundation in reinforcement learning for game development. Each chapter will assist you in implementing different reinforcement learning techniques, such as Markov decision processes (MDPs), Q-learning, actor-critic methods, SARSA, and deterministic policy gradient algorithms, to build logical self-learning agents. Learning these techniques will enhance your game development skills and add a variety of features to improve your game agent’s productivity. As you advance, you’ll understand how deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques can be used to devise strategies to help agents learn from their actions and build engaging games.By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to apply reinforcement learning techniques to build a variety of projects and contribute to open source applications.

Improving CAD Designs with Autodesk Fusion 360. A project-based guide to modelling effective parametric designs

Kevin Michael Land

Autodesk Fusion 360 has become an indispensable tool for designers, tinkerers, and engineers worldwide thanks to its versatility that allows for large-scale assemblies and smaller, quick 3D prints. If you’ve faced challenges with learning Fusion 360, this book will help you overcome them and build the confidence to design your own projects, explaining step-by-step instructions and the purpose of each tool.In this book, you’ll dive into the design workspace and learn sketching fundamentals such as setting up a component, recognizing when a sketch is fully constrained, and parametrically flexing models. Through trial and error, you’ll work on multiple easy-to-build projects to create simple, useful items that can be quickly 3D printed for use around the house and then advance to much bigger projects that require joint connectivity and large assemblies.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to sketch fully parametric designs, translate them into 3D models, and create your own unique designs.

Automate It with Zapier. Boost your business productivity using effective workflow automation techniques

Kelly Goss, Cody Jones

Zapier is an emerging no-code workflow automation technology that enables organizations to connect their cloud-based and web applications and automate data transfer between them. Zapier's built-in features and flexibility allow users to integrate thousands of business applications and create simple to complex automation to reduce time spent on repetitive tasks, thereby increasing productivity. This book is a must-have for business owners, their employees, and independent freelancers and contractors looking to use Zapier for business process automation.The book takes a hands-on approach to implementation and associated problem-solving methodologies that will have you up-and-running and productive in no time while leveling up your automation skills. You'll discover how to plan your automation building for optimal results, what are the native features available in Zapier, and the applications that connect with it, as well as how to optimally configure your workflows to automate your processes in as few steps as possible. Finally, you'll find out how to create advanced workflow automation from scratch and learn how to troubleshoot issues.By the end of this Zapier book, you'll be able to build your own advanced workflow automation using Zapier, addressing the key pain points encountered in businesses with manual and repetitive tasks.

Highcharts Essentials. Create interactive data visualization charts with the Highcharts JavaScript library

Bilal Shahid

Modern Time Series Forecasting with Python. Industry-ready machine learning and deep learning time series analysis with PyTorch and pandas - Second Edition

Manu Joseph, Jeffrey Tackes, Christoph Bergmeir

Predicting the future, whether it's market trends, energy demand, or website traffic, has never been more crucial. This practical, hands-on guide empowers you to build and deploy powerful time series forecasting models. Whether you’re working with traditional statistical methods or cutting-edge deep learning architectures, this book provides structured learning and best practices for both.Starting with the basics, this data science book introduces fundamental time series concepts, such as ARIMA and exponential smoothing, before gradually progressing to advanced topics, such as machine learning for time series, deep neural networks, and transformers. As part of your fundamentals training, you’ll learn preprocessing, feature engineering, and model evaluation. As you progress, you’ll also explore global forecasting models, ensemble methods, and probabilistic forecasting techniques.This new edition goes deeper into transformer architectures and probabilistic forecasting, including new content on the latest time series models, conformal prediction, and hierarchical forecasting. Whether you seek advanced deep learning insights or specialized architecture implementations, this edition provides practical strategies and new content to elevate your forecasting skills.

Node.js Design Patterns. Design and implement production-grade Node.js applications using proven patterns and techniques - Third Edition

Mario Casciaro, Luciano Mammino

In this book, we will show you how to implement a series of best practices and design patterns to help you create efficient and robust Node.js applications with ease.We kick off by exploring the basics of Node.js, analyzing its asynchronous event driven architecture and its fundamental design patterns. We then show you how to build asynchronous control flow patterns with callbacks, promises and async/await. Next, we dive into Node.js streams, unveiling their power and showing you how to use them at their full capacity. Following streams is an analysis of different creational, structural, and behavioral design patterns that take full advantage of JavaScript and Node.js. Lastly, the book dives into more advanced concepts such as Universal JavaScript, scalability and messaging patterns to help you build enterprise-grade distributed applications.Throughout the book, you’ll see Node.js in action with the help of several real-life examples leveraging technologies such as LevelDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ, and many others. They will be used to demonstrate a pattern or technique, but they will also give you a great introduction to the Node.js ecosystem and its set of solutions.

Instant Wijmo Widgets How-to. Learn how to use Wijmo tools to speed up UI development and browser compatibility through practical recipesLearn how to use Wijmo tools to speed up UI development and browser compatibility through practical recipes

Tochi Eke-Okoro

With Wijmo you will always be one step ahead of regular UI developers. Wijmo doesn't require a re-invention of the wheel; it is written with JQuery, so it supports regular JQuery and even native Javascript. You can initialize any widget you want to use for your project and customize its functionality and styling. With Wijmo, the possibilities are limitless!!Instant Wijmo Widgets How-to is perfect for aspiring and experienced UI developers. It describes basic techniques of initializing and deploying various UI widgets that serve a specific purpose. It is an ideal book for aspiring and experienced UI developers. It describes basic techniques for initializing and deploying various UI widgets that serve a specific purpose.Instant Wijmo Widgets How-to is structured to take you from easy to seemingly difficult topics. This implies that some widgets are easier to initialize than others. However the overall deployment of a widget is basic and straightforward, without the complexities encountered in various JQuery plugins. Every topic discussed in this book is interesting, engaging, and exciting.There is no strict direction from one chapter to the next.. Most chapters are independent of each other. This creates the flexibility to delve into just what you need to resolve a particular task.Instant Wijmo Widgets How-to serves as an important inventory for a UI developer, equipping the reader with skills to solve most UI related issues.

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.

Developing Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Applications. If you want a thoroughly practical guide to developing business applications with Microsoft Dynamics GP, this is the book for you. Its hands-on approach will have you developing or customizing in no time

Leslie Vail

Microsoft Dynamics GP is a sophisticated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application with a multitude of features and options. Microsoft Dynamics GP can also be used to develop dynamic, mission critical applications.In Developing Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Applications you will learn how to create and customize Dynamics GP Applications. This hands-on guide will take you through the initial steps of setting up a development environment through to customizing and developing an example application using tools such as Dexterity, VSTools and sanScript.Developing Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Applications will take you through the complex steps of creating and customizing Microsoft Dynamics GP applications. Starting with an overview of Microsoft Dynamics GP architecture you'll then move onto setting up your development environment.You will learn how to make your application come to life with Dexterity and sanScript. You will create table operations and ranges as well as object triggers to make powerful and practical business applications. You will deploy your Dexterity solution before moving onto customization with Modifier and VBA.This book will also take you through ways of enhancing and extending your application without code using the SmartList Builder and Excel Report Builder. Using these highly flexible tools you'll be able to create data connections that will increase the usability and functionality of your ERP applications.

Learning TypeScript 2.x. Develop and maintain captivating web applications with ease - Second Edition

Remo H. Jansen

TypeScript is an open source and cross-platform statically typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript and runs in any browser or host. This book is a step-by-step guide that will take you through the use and benefits of TypeScript with the help of practical examples. You will start off by understanding the basics as well as the new features of TypeScript 2.x. Then, you will learn how to work with functions and asynchronous programming APIs. You will continue by learning how to resolve runtime issues and how to implement TypeScript applications using the Object-oriented programming (OOP) and functional programming (FP) paradigms. Later, you will automate your development workflow with the help of tools such as Webpack. Towards the end of this book, you will delve into some real-world scenarios by implementing some full-stack TypeScript applications with Node.js, React and Angular as well as how to optimize and test them. Finally, you will be introduced to the internal APIs of the TypeScript compiler, and you will learn how to create custom code analysis tools.

Python Data Cleaning Cookbook. Modern techniques and Python tools to detect and remove dirty data and extract key insights

Michael Walker

Getting clean data to reveal insights is essential, as directly jumping into data analysis without proper data cleaning may lead to incorrect results. This book shows you tools and techniques that you can apply to clean and handle data with Python. You'll begin by getting familiar with the shape of data by using practices that can be deployed routinely with most data sources. Then, the book teaches you how to manipulate data to get it into a useful form. You'll also learn how to filter and summarize data to gain insights and better understand what makes sense and what does not, along with discovering how to operate on data to address the issues you've identified. Moving on, you'll perform key tasks, such as handling missing values, validating errors, removing duplicate data, monitoring high volumes of data, and handling outliers and invalid dates. Next, you'll cover recipes on using supervised learning and Naive Bayes analysis to identify unexpected values and classification errors, and generate visualizations for exploratory data analysis (EDA) to visualize unexpected values. Finally, you'll build functions and classes that you can reuse without modification when you have new data. By the end of this Python book, you'll be equipped with all the key skills that you need to clean data and diagnose problems within it.

Deep Inside osCommerce: The Cookbook. Ready-to-use recipes to customize and extend your e-commerce website

Monika Mathe, Monika Math?É?íÂ!(C)

osCommerce has been around since March 2000. At present there are over 10,000 live, registered osCommerce sites, and about 100,000 registered community members. Apart from providing ready-made solutions to problems, as well as a huge repository of information, the osCommerce community is a living entity with which we can all interact. With the rising success and popularity of this remarkable piece of software, things can only get better.

PostgreSQL 13 Cookbook. Over 120 recipes to build high-performance and fault-tolerant PostgreSQL database solutions

Vallarapu Naga Avinash Kumar

PostgreSQL has become the most advanced open source database on the market. This book follows a step-by-step approach, guiding you effectively in deploying PostgreSQL in production environments.The book starts with an introduction to PostgreSQL and its architecture. You’ll cover common and not-so-common challenges faced while designing and managing the database. Next, the book focuses on backup and recovery strategies to ensure your database is steady and achieves optimal performance. Throughout the book, you’ll address key challenges such as maintaining reliability, data integrity, a fault-tolerant environment, a robust feature set, extensibility, consistency, and authentication. Moving ahead, you’ll learn how to manage a PostgreSQL cluster and explore replication features for high availability. Later chapters will assist you in building a secure PostgreSQL server, along with covering recipes for encrypting data in motion and data at rest. Finally, you’ll not only discover how to tune your database for optimal performance but also understand ways to monitor and manage maintenance activities, before learning how to perform PostgreSQL upgrades during downtime.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with the essential PostgreSQL 13 features to build enterprise relational databases.

ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking. An expert guide to building enterprise-ready social networking and community applications with ASP.NET 3.5

Andrew Siemer

LaTeX Beginner's Guide. Create visually appealing texts, articles, and books for business and science using LaTeX - Second Edition

Stefan Kottwitz

LaTeX is high-quality open source typesetting software that produces professional prints and PDF files. It's a powerful and complex tool with a multitude of features, so getting started can be intimidating. However, once you become comfortable with LaTeX, its capabilities far outweigh any initial challenges, and this book will help you with just that!The LaTeX Beginner's Guide will make getting started with LaTeX easy. If you are writing mathematical, scientific, or business papers, or have a thesis to write, this is the perfect book for you. With the help of fully explained examples, this book offers a practical introduction to LaTeX with plenty of step-by-step examples that will help you achieve professional-level results in no time. You'll learn to typeset documents containing tables, figures, formulas, and common book elements such as bibliographies, glossaries, and indexes, and go on to manage complex documents and use modern PDF features. You'll also get to grips with using macros and styles to maintain a consistent document structure while saving typing work.By the end of this LaTeX book, you'll have learned how to fine-tune text and page layout, create professional-looking tables, include figures, present complex mathematical formulas, manage complex documents, and benefit from modern PDF features.

Modern Computer Vision with PyTorch. Explore deep learning concepts and implement over 50 real-world image applications

V Kishore Ayyadevara, Yeshwanth Reddy

Deep learning is the driving force behind many recent advances in various computer vision (CV) applications. This book takes a hands-on approach to help you to solve over 50 CV problems using PyTorch1.x on real-world datasets.You’ll start by building a neural network (NN) from scratch using NumPy and PyTorch and discover best practices for tweaking its hyperparameters. You’ll then perform image classification using convolutional neural networks and transfer learning and understand how they work. As you progress, you’ll implement multiple use cases of 2D and 3D multi-object detection, segmentation, human-pose-estimation by learning about the R-CNN family, SSD, YOLO, U-Net architectures, and the Detectron2 platform. The book will also guide you in performing facial expression swapping, generating new faces, and manipulating facial expressions as you explore autoencoders and modern generative adversarial networks. You’ll learn how to combine CV with NLP techniques, such as LSTM and transformer, and RL techniques, such as Deep Q-learning, to implement OCR, image captioning, object detection, and a self-driving car agent. Finally, you'll move your NN model to production on the AWS Cloud.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to leverage modern NN architectures to solve over 50 real-world CV problems confidently.

The Manager's Guide to Presentations. Ace the first presentation you deliver as a new manager and make your mark as a rising star in your organization with this book and

Lauren Hug

Lauren Hug, founder of HugSpeak Coaching & Consulting, has been helping people reach and motivate audiences for 20 years. In this concise, friendly guide, she condenses her years of presentation expertise from the courtroom to the boardroom. Your presentations are a crucial part of establishing yourself as a leader. Developing a commanding presence and exceptional public speaking skills will mark you as a rising star within your organization. And it doesn't have to be daunting. Lauren will teach you how to speak with confidence, whether you're presenting to your employees, your boss or external stakeholders.This accessible, practical book will walk you through the process step by step, from planning and developing your content, through mastering your materials, to delivering a dynamic performance and reaping the rewards in your career. With interactive exercises and templates, you'll learn how to embrace your signature speaking style, engage your audience, craft compelling content and speak like a pro. Along the way, you'll find yourself building relationships with team members and bosses alike, and developing valuable insights into your strengths as a manager. Through her positive and collaborative coaching approach, described as empowering, life-changing, and therapeutic, Lauren will help you shine as both a leader and a presenter.

Internet of Things with ESP8266. Build amazing Internet of Things projects using the ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip

Marco Schwartz

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of objects such as physical things embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and connectivity, enabling data exchange. ESP8266 is a low cost WiFi microcontroller chip that has the ability to empower IoT and helps the exchange of information among various connected objects. ESP8266 consists of networkable microcontroller modules, and with this low cost chip, IoT is booming. This book will help deepen your knowledge of the ESP8266 WiFi chip platform and get you building exciting projects. Kick-starting with an introduction to the ESP8266 chip, we will demonstrate how to build a simple LED using the ESP8266. You will then learn how to read, send, and monitor data from the cloud. Next, you’ll see how to control your devices remotely from anywhere in the world. Furthermore, you’ll get to know how to use the ESP8266 to interact with web services such as Twitter and Facebook. In order to make several ESP8266s interact and exchange data without the need for human intervention, you will be introduced to the concept of machine-to-machine communication. The latter part of the book focuses more on projects, including a door lock controlled from the cloud, building a physical Bitcoin ticker, and doing wireless gardening. You’ll learn how to build a cloud-based ESP8266 home automation system and a cloud-controlled ESP8266 robot. Finally, you’ll discover how to build your own cloud platform to control ESP8266 devices.With this book, you will be able to create and program Internet of Things projects using the ESP8266 WiFi chip.

Windows PowerShell for .NET Developers. Efficiently administer and maintain your development environment with Windows PowerShell - Second Edition

Chendrayan Venkatesan, Sherif Talaat

Windows PowerShell 5.0 for .NET Developers is your self-start guide to performing automation using Windows PowerShell. This book will help you to understand the PowerShell syntax and grammar and will also teach you techniques to remove the rough edges of manual deployments. Packed with PowerShell scripts and sample C# codes to automate tasks, it also includes real-world scenarios such as administrating office servers to help you save time and perform deployments swiftly and efficiently. The book begins with the Windows PowerShell basics, explores the significant features of Windows Management Framework 5.0, covers the basic concepts of Desired State Configuration and the importance of idempotent deployments. By the end of the book, you will have a good understanding of Windows PowerShell’s features and will be able to automate your tasks and manage configuration effectively.

Stencyl Essentials. Build beautiful, unique, cross-platform games rapidly with the free Stencyl 2D game engine and toolset

Richard Sneyd