Robotic Process Automation Projects. Build real-world RPA solutions using UiPath and Automation Anywhere

Nandan Mullakara, Arun Kumar Asokan

Robotic Process automation helps businesses to automate monotonous tasks that can be performed by machines.This project-based guide will help you progress through easy to more advanced RPA projects. You’ll learn the principles of RPA and how to architect solutions to meet the demands of business automation, along with exploring the most popular RPA tools - UiPath and Automation Anywhere. In the first part, you’ll learn how to use UiPath by building a simple helpdesk ticket system. You’ll then automate CRM systems by integrating Excel data with UiPath. After this, the book will guide you through building an AI-based social media moderator using Google Cloud Vision API. In the second part, you’ll learn about Automation Anywhere's latest Cloud RPA platform (A2019) by creating projects such as an automated ERP administration system, an AI bot for order and invoice processing, and an automated emergency notification system for employees. Later, you’ll get hands-on with advanced RPA tasks such as invoking APIs, before covering complex concepts such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning in automation to take your understanding of RPA to the next level.By the end of the book, you’ll have a solid foundation in RPA with experience in building real-world projects.

Developing Kaggle Notebooks. Pave your way to becoming a Kaggle Notebooks Grandmaster

Gabriel Preda, D. Sculley, Anthony Goldbloom

Developing Kaggle Notebooks introduces you to data analysis, with a focus on using Kaggle Notebooks to simultaneously achieve mastery in this fi eld and rise to the top of the Kaggle Notebooks tier. The book is structured as a sevenstep data analysis journey, exploring the features available in Kaggle Notebooks alongside various data analysis techniques.For each topic, we provide one or more notebooks, developing reusable analysis components through Kaggle's Utility Scripts feature, introduced progressively, initially as part of a notebook, and later extracted for use across future notebooks to enhance code reusability on Kaggle. It aims to make the notebooks' code more structured, easy to maintain, and readable.Although the focus of this book is on data analytics, some examples will guide you in preparing a complete machine learning pipeline using Kaggle Notebooks. Starting from initial data ingestion and data quality assessment, you'll move on to preliminary data analysis, advanced data exploration, feature qualifi cation to build a model baseline, and feature engineering. You'll also delve into hyperparameter tuning to iteratively refi ne your model and prepare for submission in Kaggle competitions. Additionally, the book touches on developing notebooks that leverage the power of generative AI using Kaggle Models.

Mastering PostCSS for Web Design. Explore the power of PostCSS to write highly performing, modular, and modern CSS code for your web pages

Alex Libby

PostCSS is a tool that has quickly emerged as the future of existing preprocessors such as SASS and Less, mainly because of its power, speed, and ease of use. This comprehensive guide offers in-depth guidance on incorporating cutting-edge styles into your web page and at the same time maintaining the performance and maintainability of your code. The book will show how you can take advantage of PostCSS to simplify the entire process of stylesheet authoring. It covers various techniques to add dynamic and modern styling features to your web pages. As the book progresses, you will learn how to make CSS code more maintainable by taking advantage of the modular architecture of PostCSS. By the end of this book, you would have mastered the art of adding modern CSS effects to web pages by authoring high performing, maintainable stylesheets.

Complete Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Development with Unity. Leverage the power of Unity and become a pro at creating mixed reality applications

Jesse Glover, Jonathan Linowes

Unity is the leading platform to develop mixed reality experiences because it provides a great pipeline for working with 3D assets.Using a practical and project-based approach, this Learning Path educates you about the specifics of AR and VR development using Unity 2018 and Unity 3D. You’ll learn to integrate, animate, and overlay 3D objects on your camera feed, before moving on to implement sensor-based AR applications. You’ll explore various concepts by creating an AR application using Vuforia for both macOS and Windows for Android and iOS devices. Next, you’ll learn how to develop VR applications that can be experienced with devices, such as Oculus and Vive. You’ll also explore various tools for VR development: gaze-based versus hand controller input, world space UI canvases, locomotion and teleportation, timeline animation, and multiplayer networking. You’ll learn the Unity 3D game engine via the interactive Unity Editor and C# programming. By the end of this Learning Path, you’ll be fully equipped to develop rich, interactive mixed reality experiences using Unity.This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products:• Unity Virtual Reality Projects - Second Edition by Jonathan Linowes• Unity 2018 Augmented Reality Projects by Jesse Glover

PySide GUI Application Development. Develop more dynamic and robust GUI applications using PySide, an open source cross-platform UI framework - Second Edition

Venkateshwaran Loganathan, Gopinath Jaganmohan

Elegantly-built GUI applications are always a massive hit among users. PySide is an open source software project that provides Python bindings for the Qt cross-platform UI framework. Combining the power of Qt and Python, PySide provides easy access to the Qt framework for Python developers and also acts as an excellent rapid application development platform.This book will take you through everything you need to know to develop UI applications. You will learn about installing and building PySide in various major operating systems as well as the basics of GUI programming. The book will then move on to discuss event management, signals and slots, and the widgets and dialogs available with PySide. Database interaction and manipulation is also covered.By the end of this book, you will be able to program GUI applications efficiently and master how to develop your own applications and how to run them across platforms.

Autodesk AutoCAD 2013 Practical 3D Drafting and Design. Take your AuotoCAD design skills to the next dimension by creating powerful 3D models

JOAO ANTONIO C DOS SANTOS

AutoCAD is a computer-aided design (CAD) and drafting software application. AutoCAD supports both 2D and 3D formats. AutoCAD is used in a range of industries and is utilized by architects, project managers, and engineers, among others.Autodesk AutoCAD 2013 Practical 3D Drafting and Design will take you beyond the 2D frontier and help you create accurate 3D models that simulate reality. This book is crammed full of creative and practical tutorials which will help you master the third dimension. From exercises on coordinate systems to creating solids and surfaces from 2D, you will wonder how you ever designed without this resource by your side.Autodesk AutoCAD 2013 Practical 3D Drafting and Design is full of hands-on studies and projects that will help develop your 3D skills. Starting from the assumption of only a very basic knowledge of AutoCAD, this book will help you master 3D visualization and coordinate systems, create 3D models from 2D drawings, and from basic shapes, measure volumes, and other information, obtain 2D construction drawings from 3D models as well as how to apply lights and materials to get photorealistic images.

Troubleshooting Citrix XenApp!AE. Click here to enter text

Dragos Madarasan, Suraj Ramchandra

Citrix XenApp® is an application virtualization product from Citrix. It allows users to connect to their corporate applications from various computer systems and even mobile devices. XenApp® has grown into a complex software with ever-expanding infrastructures in place. Together with tight integrations with other systems such as Terminal Services, Active Directory, and other third-party authentication services, troubleshooting XenApp® has become more complicated.This book teaches you how to approach troubleshooting complex issues with XenApp® deployments and understand the problem, find a fix or workaround, determine the root cause, and apply corrective steps wherever applicable. The book progresses to give you an idea about the many supportive components that play an important role in XenApp’s application delivery model and should be considered while troubleshooting XenApp® issues. It also shows you standard troubleshooting processes so that you can resolve complex XenApp® issues in a mission critical environment.By the end of this book, you will see how and where to use supportive components that help minimize XenApp® issues. Also, we’ll explain various tools that can be useful when monitoring and optimizing entire application and desktop delivery model.

Learn Clip Studio Paint. A beginner's guide to creating compelling comics and manga art - Third Edition

Inko Ai Takita, Liz Staley

Clip Studio Paint is a versatile digital painting program for creating manga and illustrations, helping artists expand their digital portfolio. This software is packed with tools that make panel laying, speech adding, toning, and editing much easier. This easy-to-follow guide is clearly divided into chapters covering drawing tools, interface customization, and using various visual effects so you can focus on specific techniques in detail one at a time.Learn Clip Studio Paint is a comprehensive introduction for those who are new to Clip Studio Paint that will have you up to speed in no time. You'll start by experiencing what it's like to create manga digitally and find new ways to shape your drawing. Next, using practical tips and rich visual references, the book shows you how to apply techniques to your creations, giving you the opportunity to expand your range of visual expression. As you advance, you'll explore how to create special effect brushes using an in-depth example, along with discovering how to color, blend, and edit your art digitally. Finally, you'll find out how to print, use the Clip Studio Paint Assets, and learn how to create unique and inspiring art that stands out from the rest.By the end of this Clip Studio Paint book, you'll have gained a clear understanding of its tools and be able to start telling your own manga story using your improved digital drawing skills.

Building Big Data Pipelines with Apache Beam. Use a single programming model for both batch and stream data processing

Jan Lukavský

Apache Beam is an open source unified programming model for implementing and executing data processing pipelines, including Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL), batch, and stream processing.This book will help you to confidently build data processing pipelines with Apache Beam. You’ll start with an overview of Apache Beam and understand how to use it to implement basic pipelines. You’ll also learn how to test and run the pipelines efficiently. As you progress, you’ll explore how to structure your code for reusability and also use various Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Later chapters will show you how to use schemas and query your data using (streaming) SQL. Finally, you’ll understand advanced Apache Beam concepts, such as implementing your own I/O connectors.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a deep understanding of the Apache Beam model and be able to apply it to solve problems.

Apache Cassandra Essentials. Create your own massively scalable Cassandra database with highly responsive database queries

Nitin Padalia

Apache Cassandra Essentials takes you step-by-step from from the basics of installation to advanced installation options and database design techniques. It gives you all the information you need to effectively design a well distributed and high performance database. You’ll get to know about the steps that are performed by a Cassandra node when you execute a read/write query, which is essential to properly maintain of a Cassandra cluster and to debug any issues. Next, you’ll discover how to integrate a Cassandra driver in your applications and perform read/write operations. Finally, you’ll learn about the various tools provided by Cassandra for serviceability aspects such as logging, metrics, backup, and recovery.

Deep Learning: Practical Neural Networks with Java. Build and run intelligent applications by leveraging key Java machine learning libraries

Fabio M. Soares, Boštjan Kaluža, Alan M. F. Souza, Yusuke Sugomori

Machine learning applications are everywhere, from self-driving cars, spam detection, document search, and trading strategies, to speech recognitionStarting with an introduction to basic machine learning algorithms, this course takes you further into this vital world of stunning predictive insights and remarkable machine intelligence. This course helps you solve challenging problems in image processing, speech recognition, language modeling. You will discover how to detect anomalies and fraud, and ways to perform activity recognition, image recognition, and text. You will also work with examples such as weather forecasting, disease diagnosis, customer profiling, generalization, extreme machine learning and more. By the end of this course, you will have all the knowledge you need to perform deep learning on your system with varying complexity levels, to apply them to your daily work.The course provides you with highly practical content explaining deep learning with Java, from the following Packt books:1. Java Deep Learning Essentials 2. Machine Learning in Java3. Neural Network Programming with Java, Second Edition

Edge Computing Systems with Kubernetes. A use case guide for building edge systems using K3s, k3OS, and open source cloud native technologies

Sergio Méndez

Edge computing is a way of processing information near the source of data instead of processing it on data centers in the cloud. In this way, edge computing can reduce latency when data is processed, improving the user experience on real-time data visualization for your applications. Using K3s, a light-weight Kubernetes and k3OS, a K3s-based Linux distribution along with other open source cloud native technologies, you can build reliable edge computing systems without spending a lot of money.In this book, you will learn how to design edge computing systems with containers and edge devices using sensors, GPS modules, WiFi, LoRa communication and so on. You will also get to grips with different use cases and examples covered in this book, how to solve common use cases for edge computing such as updating your applications using GitOps, reading data from sensors and storing it on SQL and NoSQL databases. Later chapters will show you how to connect hardware to your edge clusters, predict using machine learning, and analyze images with computer vision. All the examples and use cases in this book are designed to run on devices using 64-bit ARM processors, using Raspberry Pi devices as an example.By the end of this book, you will be able to use the content of these chapters as small pieces to create your own edge computing system.

Splunk: Enterprise Operational Intelligence Delivered. Machine data made accessible

Derek Mock, Betsy Page Sigman, Paul R. Johnson, Erickson Delgado, ...

Splunk is an extremely powerful tool for searching, exploring, and visualizing data of all types. Splunk is becoming increasingly popular, as more and more businesses, both large and small, discover its ease and usefulness. Analysts, managers, students, and others can quickly learn how to use the data from their systems, networks, web traffic, and social media to make attractive and informative reports. This course will teach everything right from installing and configuring Splunk.The first module is for anyone who wants to manage data with Splunk. You’ll start with very basics of Splunk— installing Splunk— before then moving on to searching machine data with Splunk. You will gather data from different sources, isolate them by indexes, classify them into source types, and tag them with the essential fields.With more than 70 recipes on hand in the second module that demonstrate all of Splunk’s features, not only will you find quick solutions to common problems, but you’ll also learn a wide range of strategies and uncover new ideas that will make you rethink what operational intelligence means to you and your organization.Dive deep into Splunk to find the most efficient solution to your data problems in the third module. Create the robust Splunk solutions you need to make informed decisions in big data machine analytics. From visualizations to enterprise integration, this well-organized high level guide has everything you need for Splunk mastery.This learning path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer into one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products:• Splunk Essentials - Second Edition• Splunk Operational Intelligence Cookbook - Second Edition• Advanced Splunk

Ubuntu Server Essentials. Unleash the true potential of Ubuntu Server in your production environment using this administration guide

Abdelmonam Kouka

Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux operating system built on top of the Debian architecture. It is used to make operating systems for multiple platforms, including phones, desktops, TVs and mobiles. It has made some serious progress in the realms of efficiency and user friendliness.With evolving technology trends, demands on software have changed, with more and more skilled users. Over the past few years, services such as Facebook, Twitter, and push notifications on smartphones mean that users are used to being up to date with everything that happens all the time. With SignalR, the applications stay connected and will generate notifications when something happens either from the system or by other users. This provides new opportunities for the system administrators, to enter this new and exciting world of real-time application development.This is a concise and a cost-friendly guide, packed with up-to-date essentials on Ubuntu Server fundamentals. It will guide you through deploying and configuring Ubuntu servers in your office environments. You’ll start by installing Ubuntu Server, then move to the most useful aspect —the command-line interface inside it. You’ll extend your knowledge by learning how to administrate and configure Ubuntu Server. You will also see how to deploy services on Ubuntu Server and find out how to secure it. You’ll get to grips with the virtualization and cloud computing facilities provided by Ubuntu, and finally, you’ll gain some very useful tips.

Yii2 By Example. Develop complete web applications from scratch through practical examples and tips for beginners and more advanced users

Fabrizio Caldarelli

Yii is a high-performance PHP framework best for developing Web 2.0 applications. It provides fast, secure, and professional features to create robust projects, however, this rapid development requires the ability to organize common tasks together to build a complete application. It's all too easy to get confused; this is where this book comes in.This book contains a series of practical project examples for developers starting from scratch. Each section contains the most relevant theories for every topic as you walk through developing each project, focusing on key aspects that commonly confuse users.The book starts with all the framework’s basic concepts, such as controllers and views, to introduce you to Yii and creating your first application, a simple news reader. You will be learn to configure URL rules to make a pretty URL, essential for search engine optimization. Next, you will walk through Model and ActiveRecord, key concepts in database interaction.The second application you will develop is a reservation system that allows you to manage rooms, customers, and reservations. For this, you will use database connection through SQL and ActiveRecord. More complex than the first one, this application will introduce you to the advanced template of Yii 2, splitting the app into two parts: a frontend for all visitors and a backend for the admin. Finally, you will move on to the last two applications: one that allows connections from remote clients, through RESTful components of Yii 2, and another that creates and organizes automatic tasks using the console application structure of Yii 2.

QlikView for Finance. Concoct dynamic business intelligence dashboards for financial analysis with QlikView

B Diane Blackwood, Diane B Blackwood

This book is an effective step-by-step tutoring guide for financial analysis using Qlikview.It begins by teaching you the crucial concepts of Qlikview Finance to help you develop an effective understanding of financial data analysis and finance. The book then goes on to cover real-world, practical examples on the use of Qlikview for financial planning and analysis, expense management, risk management, and more. Moving on, topics such as Asset Management QlikView Dashboard and Retail Sales Analysis are covered in a strategic way. We then shift the focus to deal with the concepts of Inventory, Supply Chain, and Plant Coverage Dashboards. The book then reaches its conclusion by dealing with ways to share your QlikView insights. By the end of this book, you will have a good understanding of how to use Qlikview for numerous applications in finance.

Practical Cybersecurity Architecture. A guide to creating and implementing robust designs for cybersecurity architects

Ed Moyle, Diana Kelley

Cybersecurity architects work with others to develop a comprehensive understanding of the business' requirements. They work with stakeholders to plan designs that are implementable, goal-based, and in keeping with the governance strategy of the organization.With this book, you'll explore the fundamentals of cybersecurity architecture: addressing and mitigating risks, designing secure solutions, and communicating with others about security designs. The book outlines strategies that will help you work with execution teams to make your vision a concrete reality, along with covering ways to keep designs relevant over time through ongoing monitoring, maintenance, and continuous improvement. As you progress, you'll also learn about recognized frameworks for building robust designs as well as strategies that you can adopt to create your own designs.By the end of this book, you will have the skills you need to be able to architect solutions with robust security components for your organization, whether they are infrastructure solutions, application solutions, or others.

Building Blazor WebAssembly Applications with gRPC. Learn how to implement source generators and gRPC in your Blazor apps for better performance

Václav Pekárek

Building Blazor WebAssembly Applications with gRPC will take you to the next level in your web development career. After working through all the essentials of gRPC, Blazor, and source generators, you will be far from a beginner C# developer and would qualify as a developer with intermediate knowledge of the Blazor ecosystem.After a quick primer on the basics of Blazor technology, REST, gRPC, and source generators, you’ll dive straight into building Blazor WASM applications. You’ll learn about everything from two-way bindings and Razor syntax to project setup. The practical emphasis continues throughout the book as you steam through creating data repositories, working with REST, and building and registering gRPC services. The chapters also cover how to manage source generators, C# and debugging best practices, and more. There is no shorter path than this book to solidify your gRPC-enabled web development knowledge.By the end of this book, your knowledge of building Blazor applications with one of the most modern and powerful frameworks around will equip you with a highly sought-after skill set that you can leverage in the best way possible.

Python GUI Programming Cookbook. Develop functional and responsive user interfaces with tkinter and PyQt5 - Third Edition

Burkhard Meier

Python is a multi-domain, interpreted programming language that is easy to learn and implement. With its wide support for frameworks to develop GUIs, you can build interactive and beautiful GUI-based applications easily using Python. This third edition of Python GUI Programming Cookbook follows a task-based approach to help you create effective GUIs with the smallest amount of code. Every recipe in this book builds upon the last to create an entire, real-life GUI application. These recipes also help you solve problems that you might encounter while developing GUIs. This book mainly focuses on using Python’s built-in tkinter GUI framework. You'll learn how to create GUIs in Python using simple programming styles and object-oriented programming (OOP). As you add more widgets and expand your GUI, you will learn how to connect to networks, databases, and graphical libraries that greatly enhance the functionality of your GUI. You’ll also learn how to use threading to ensure that your GUI doesn't become unresponsive. Toward the end, you’ll learn about the versatile PyQt GUI framework, which comes along with its own visual editor that allows you to design GUIs using drag and drop features. By the end of the book, you’ll be an expert in designing Python GUIs and be able to develop a variety of GUI applications with ease.

Lucene 4 Cookbook. Over 70 hands-on recipes to quickly and effectively integrate Lucene into your search application

Edwood Ng, Vineeth Mohan

Learning Neo4j. Run blazingly fast queries on complex graph datasets with the power of the Neo4j graph database

Rik Van Bruggen

Generative AI with Python and PyTorch. Navigating the AI frontier with LLMs, Stable Diffusion, and next-gen AI applications - Second Edition

Joseph Babcock, Raghav Bali

Become an expert in Generative AI through immersive, hands-on projects that leverage today’s most powerful models for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and computer vision. Generative AI with Python and PyTorch is your end-to-end guide to creating advanced AI applications, made easy by Raghav Bali, a seasoned data scientist with multiple patents in AI, and Joseph Babcock, a PhD and machine learning expert. Through business-tested approaches, this book simplifies complex GenAI concepts, making learning both accessible and immediately applicable.From NLP to image generation, this second edition explores practical applications and the underlying theories that power these technologies. By integrating the latest advancements in LLMs, it prepares you to design and implement powerful AI systems that transform data into actionable intelligence.You’ll build your versatile LLM toolkit by gaining expertise in GPT-4, LangChain, RLHF, LoRA, RAG, and more. You’ll also explore deep learning techniques for image generation and apply styler transfer using GANs, before advancing to implement CLIP and diffusion models.Whether you’re generating dynamic content or developing complex AI-driven solutions, this book equips you with everything you need to harness the full transformative power of Python and AI.

Managing Software Requirements the Agile Way. Bridge the gap between software requirements and executable specifications to deliver successful projects

Fred Heath

Difficulty in accurately capturing and managing requirements is the most common cause of software project failure. Learning how to analyze and model requirements and produce specifications that are connected to working code is the single most fundamental step that you can take toward project success. This book focuses on a delineated and structured methodology that will help you analyze requirements and write comprehensive, verifiable specifications.You'll start by learning about the different entities in the requirements domain and how to discover them based on customer input. You’ll then explore tried-and-tested methods such as impact mapping and behavior-driven development (BDD), along with new techniques such as D3 and feature-first development. This book takes you through the process of modeling customer requirements as impact maps and writing them as executable specifications. You’ll also understand how to organize and prioritize project tasks using Agile frameworks, such as Kanban and Scrum, and verify specifications against the delivered code. Finally, you'll see how to start implementing the requirements management methodology in a real-life scenario.By the end of this book, you'll be able to model and manage requirements to create executable specifications that will help you deliver successful software projects.

Mastering PLC Programming. The software engineering survival guide to automation programming

M. T. White

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a new feature of PLC programming that has taken the automation world by storm. This book provides you with the necessary skills to succeed in the modern automation programming environment.The book is designed in a way to take you through advanced topics such as OOP design, SOLID programming, the software development lifecycle (SDLC), library design, HMI development, general software engineering practices, and more. To hone your programming skills, each chapter has a simulated real-world project that’ll enable you to apply the skills you’ve learned. In all, this book not only covers complex PLC programming topics, but it also removes the financial barrier that comes with most books as all examples utilize free software. This means that to follow along, you DO NOT need to purchase any PLC hardware or software.By the end of this PLC book, you will have what it takes to create long-lasting codebases for any modern automation project.