Learning Microsoft Cognitive Services. Leverage Machine Learning APIs to build smart applications - Second Edition

Leif Larsen

Microsoft has revamped its Project Oxford to launch the all new Cognitive Services platform-a set of 30 APIs to add speech, vision, language, and knowledge capabilities to apps.This book will introduce you to 24 of the APIs released as part of Cognitive Services platform and show you how to leverage their capabilities. More importantly, you'll see how the power of these APIs can be combined to build real-world apps that have cognitive capabilities. The book is split into three sections: computer vision, speech recognition and language processing, and knowledge and search.You will be taken through the vision APIs at first as this is very visual, and not too complex. The next part revolves around speech and language, which are somewhat connected. The last part is about adding real-world intelligence to apps by connecting them to Knowledge and Search APIs.By the end of this book, you will be in a position to understand what Microsoft Cognitive Service can offer and how to use the different APIs.

Ethereum Projects for Beginners. Build blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and DApps

Kenny Vaneetvelde

Ethereum enables the development of efficient, smart contracts that contain code. These smart contracts can interact with other smart contracts to make decisions, store data, and send Ether to others.Ethereum Projects for Beginners provides you with a clear introduction to creating cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and decentralized applications. As you make your way through the book, you’ll get to grips with detailed step-by-step processes to build advanced Ethereum projects. Each project will teach you enough about Ethereum to be productive right away. You will learn how tokenization works, think in a decentralized way, and build blockchain-based distributed computing systems. Towards the end of the book, you will develop interesting Ethereum projects such as creating wallets and secure data sharing.By the end of this book, you will be able to tackle blockchain challenges by implementing end-to-end projects using the full power of the Ethereum blockchain.

R Web Scraping Quick Start Guide. Techniques and tools to crawl and scrape data from websites

Olgun Aydin

Web scraping is a technique to extract data from websites. It simulates the behavior of a website user to turn the website itself into a web service to retrieve or introduce new data. This book gives you all you need to get started with scraping web pages using R programming.You will learn about the rules of RegEx and Xpath, key components for scraping website data. We will show you web scraping techniques, methodologies, and frameworks. With this book's guidance, you will become comfortable with the tools to write and test RegEx and XPath rules. We will focus on examples of dynamic websites for scraping data and how to implement the techniques learned. You will learn how to collect URLs and then create XPath rules for your first web scraping script using rvest library. From the data you collect, you will be able to calculate the statistics and create R plots to visualize them. Finally, you will discover how to use Selenium drivers with R for more sophisticated scraping. You will create AWS instances and use R to connect a PostgreSQL database hosted on AWS. By the end of the book, you will be sufficiently confident to create end-to-end web scraping systems using R.

Mastering Office 365 Administration. A complete and comprehensive guide to Office 365 Administration - manage users, domains, licenses, and much more

Thomas Carpe, Nikkia Carter, Alara Rogers

In today's world, every organization aims to migrate to the cloud in order to become more efficient by making full use of the latest technologies. Office 365 is your one-stop solution to making your organization reliable, scalable, and fast.This book will start with an overview of Office 365 components, and help you learn how to use the administration portal, and perform basic administration. It then goes on to cover common management tasks, such as managing users, admin roles, groups, securing Office 365, and enforcing compliance. In the next set of chapters, you will learn about topics including managing Skype for Business Online, Yammer, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams. In the final section of the book, you will learn how to carry out reporting and monitor Office 365 service health.By the end of this book, you will be able to implement enterprise-level services with Office 365 based on your organization's needs.

Performance Testing with JMeter 3. Enhance the performance of your web application - Third Edition

Bayo Erinle

JMeter is a Java application designed to load and test performance for web application. JMeter extends to improve the functioning of various other static and dynamic resources. This book is a great starting point to learn about JMeter. It covers the new features introduced with JMeter 3 and enables you to dive deep into the new techniques needed for measuring your website performance.The book starts with the basics of performance testing and guides you through recording your first test scenario, before diving deeper into JMeter. You will also learn how to configure JMeter and browsers to help record test plans.Moving on, you will learn how to capture form submission in JMeter, dive into managing sessions with JMeter and see how to leverage some of the components provided by JMeter to handle web application HTTP sessions. You will also learn how JMeter can help monitor tests in real-time.Further, you will go in depth into distributed testing and see how to leverage the capabilities of JMeter to accomplish this. You will get acquainted with some tips and best practices with regard to performance testing. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to take full advantage of the real power behind Apache JMeter.

React: Cross-Platform Application Development with React Native. Build 4 real-world apps with React Native

Emilio Rodriguez Martinez

React Native helps web and mobile developers to build cross-platform apps that perform at the same level as any other natively developed app. The range of apps that can be built using this library is huge. From e-commerce to games, React Native is a good fit for any mobile project due to its flexibility and extendable nature. This project-based book consists of four standalone projects. Each project will help you gain a sound understanding of the framework and build mobile apps with native user experience. Starting with a simple standalone car booking app, you will progressively move on to building advanced apps by adding connectivity with external APIs, using native features, such as the camera or microphone, in the mobile device, integrating with state management libraries such as Redux or MobX, or leveraging React Native’s performance by building a full-featured game.This book is ideal for developers who want to build amazing cross-platform apps with React Native.This book is embedded with useful assessments that will help you revise the concepts you have learned in this book. This book is repurposed for this specific learning experience from the content of Packt's React Native Blueprints by Emilio Rodriguez Martinez.

Security with Go. Explore the power of Golang to secure host, web, and cloud services

John Daniel Leon

Go is becoming more and more popular as a language for security experts. Its wide use in server and cloud environments, its speed and ease of use, and its evident capabilities for data analysis, have made it a prime choice for developers who need to think about security.Security with Go is the first Golang security book, and it is useful for both blue team and red team applications. With this book, you will learn how to write secure software, monitor your systems, secure your data, attack systems, and extract information.Defensive topics include cryptography, forensics, packet capturing, and building secure web applications.Offensive topics include brute force, port scanning, packet injection, web scraping, social engineering, and post exploitation techniques.

OpenCV 3.x with Python By Example. Make the most of OpenCV and Python to build applications for object recognition and augmented reality - Second Edition

Gabriel Garrido Calvo, Prateek Joshi

Computer vision is found everywhere in modern technology. OpenCV for Python enables us to run computer vision algorithms in real time. With the advent of powerful machines, we have more processing power to work with. Using this technology, we can seamlessly integrate our computer vision applications into the cloud. Focusing on OpenCV 3.x and Python 3.6, this book will walk you through all the building blocks needed to build amazing computer vision applications with ease.We start off by manipulating images using simple filtering and geometric transformations. We then discuss affine and projective transformations and see how we can use them to apply cool advanced manipulations to your photos like resizing them while keeping the content intact or smoothly removing undesired elements. We will then cover techniques of object tracking, body part recognition, and object recognition using advanced techniques of machine learning such as artificial neural network. 3D reconstruction and augmented reality techniques are also included. The book covers popular OpenCV libraries with the help of examples.This book is a practical tutorial that covers various examples at different levels, teaching you about the different functions of OpenCV and their actual implementation. By the end of this book, you will have acquired the skills to use OpenCV and Python to develop real-world computer vision applications.

Hands-On Dashboard Development with QlikView. Practical guide to creating interactive and user-friendly business intelligence dashboards

Abhishek Agarwal

QlikView is one of the market leaders when it comes to building effective Business Intelligence solutions. This book will show how you can leverage its power to build your own dashboards to tell your own data story.The book starts with showing you how to connect your data to QlikView and create your own QlikView application. You will learn how to add data from multiple sources, create a data model by joining data, and then review it on the front end. You will work with QlikView components such as charts, list boxes, input boxes, and text objects to create stunning visualizations that help give actionable business insights. You will also learn how to perform analysis on your data in QlikView and master the various types of security measures to be taken in QlikView.By the end of this book, you will have all the essential knowledge required for insightful data storytelling and creating useful BI dashboards using QlikView.

Angular Design Patterns. Implement the Gang of Four patterns in your apps with Angular

Mathieu Nayrolles

This book is an insightful journey through the most valuable design patterns, and it will provide clear guidance on how to use them effectively in Angular. You will explore some of the best ways to work with Angular and how to use it to meet the stability and performance required in today's web development world. You’ll get to know some Angular best practices to improve your productivity and the code base of your application.We will take you on a journey through Angular designs for the real world, using a combination of case studies, design patterns to follow, and anti-patterns to avoid.By the end of the book, you will understand the various features of Angular, and will be able to apply well-known, industry-proven design patterns in your work.

Recurrent Neural Networks with Python Quick Start Guide. Sequential learning and language modeling with TensorFlow

Simeon Kostadinov

Developers struggle to find an easy-to-follow learning resource for implementing Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models. RNNs are the state-of-the-art model in deep learning for dealing with sequential data. From language translation to generating captions for an image, RNNs are used to continuously improve results. This book will teach you the fundamentals of RNNs, with example applications in Python and the TensorFlow library. The examples are accompanied by the right combination of theoretical knowledge and real-world implementations of concepts to build a solid foundation of neural network modeling.Your journey starts with the simplest RNN model, where you can grasp the fundamentals. The book then builds on this by proposing more advanced and complex algorithms. We use them to explain how a typical state-of-the-art RNN model works. From generating text to building a language translator, we show how some of today's most powerful AI applications work under the hood.After reading the book, you will be confident with the fundamentals of RNNs, and be ready to pursue further study, along with developing skills in this exciting field.

Hands-On MQTT Programming with Python. Work with the lightweight IoT protocol in Python

Gaston C. Hillar

MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol for small sensors and mobile devices. This book explores the features of the latest versions of MQTT for IoT and M2M communications, how to use them with Python 3, and allow you to interact with sensors and actuators using Python.The book begins with the specific vocabulary of MQTT and its working modes, followed by installing a Mosquitto MQTT broker. You will use different utilities and diagrams to understand the most important concepts related to MQTT. You will learn to make all the necessary configuration to work with digital certificates for encrypting all data sent between the MQTT clients and the server. You will also work with the different Quality of Service levels and later analyze and compare their overheads.You will write Python 3.x code to control a vehicle with MQTT messages delivered through encrypted connections (TLS 1.2), and learn how leverage your knowledge of the MQTT protocol to build a solution based on requirements. Towards the end, you will write Python code to use the PubNub cloud-based real-time MQTT provider to monitor a surfing competition.In the end, you will have a solution that was built from scratch by analyzing the requirements and then write Python code that will run on water-proof IoT boards connected to multiple sensors in surfboards.

Keras 2.x Projects. 9 projects demonstrating faster experimentation of neural network and deep learning applications using Keras

Giuseppe Ciaburro

Keras 2.x Projects explains how to leverage the power of Keras to build and train state-of-the-art deep learning models through a series of practical projects that look at a range of real-world application areas. To begin with, you will quickly set up a deep learning environment by installing the Keras library. Through each of the projects, you will explore and learn the advanced concepts of deep learning and will learn how to compute and run your deep learning models using the advanced offerings of Keras. You will train fully-connected multilayer networks, convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, autoencoders and generative adversarial networks using real-world training datasets. The projects you will undertake are all based on real-world scenarios of all complexity levels, covering topics such as language recognition, stock volatility, energy consumption prediction, faster object classification for self-driving vehicles, and more. By the end of this book, you will be well versed with deep learning and its implementation with Keras. You will have all the knowledge you need to train your own deep learning models to solve different kinds of problems.

Building Serverless Python Web Services with Zappa. Build and deploy serverless applications on AWS using Zappa

Abdulwahid Abdulhaque Barguzar

Serverless applications are becoming very popular these days, not just because they save developers the trouble of managing the servers, but also because they provide several other benefits such as cutting heavy costs and improving the overall performance of the application.This book will help you build serverless applications in a quick and efficient way. We begin with an introduction to AWS and the API gateway, the environment for serverless development, and Zappa. We then look at building, testing, and deploying apps in AWS with three different frameworks--Flask, Django, and Pyramid. Setting up a custom domain along with SSL certificates and configuring them with Zappa is also covered. A few advanced Zappa settings are also covered along with securing Zappa with AWS VPC.By the end of the book you will have mastered using three frameworks to build robust and cost-efficient serverless apps in Python.

Hands-On RESTful Web Services with TypeScript 3. Design and develop scalable RESTful APIs for your applications

Biharck Muniz Araújo

In the world of web development, leveraging data is the key to developing comprehensive applications, and RESTful APIs help you to achieve this systematically. This book will guide you in designing and developing web services with the power of TypeScript 3 and Node.js. You'll design REST APIs using best practices for request handling, validation, authentication, and authorization. You'll also understand how to enhance the capabilities of your APIs with ODMs, databases, models and views, as well as asynchronous callbacks. This book will guide you in securing your environment by testing your services and initiating test automation with different testing approaches. Furthermore, you'll get to grips with developing secure, testable, and more efficient code, and be able to scale and deploy TypeScript 3 and Node.js-powered RESTful APIs on cloud platforms such as the Google Cloud Platform. Finally, the book will help you explore microservices and give you an overview of what GraphQL can allow you to do.By the end of this book, you will be able to use RESTful web services to create your APIs for mobile and web apps and other platforms.

Learn Linux Shell Scripting - Fundamentals of Bash 4.4. A comprehensive guide to automating administrative tasks with the Bash shell

Sebastiaan Tammer

Shell scripts allow us to program commands in chains and have the system execute them as a scripted event, just like batch files. This book will start with an overview of Linux and Bash shell scripting, and then quickly deep dive into helping you set up your local environment, before introducing you to tools that are used to write shell scripts. The next set of chapters will focus on helping you understand Linux under the hood and what Bash provides the user. Soon, you will have embarked on your journey along the command line. You will now begin writing actual scripts instead of commands, and will be introduced to practical applications for scripts. The final set of chapters will deep dive into the more advanced topics in shell scripting. These advanced topics will take you from simple scripts to reusable, valuable programs that exist in the real world. The final chapter will leave you with some handy tips and tricks and, as regards the most frequently used commands, a cheat sheet containing the most interesting flags and options will also be provided.After completing this book, you should feel confident about starting your own shell scripting projects, no matter how simple or complex the task previously seemed. We aim to teach you how to script and what to consider, to complement the clear-cut patterns that you can use in your daily scripting challenges.

Regression Analysis with R. Design and develop statistical nodes to identify unique relationships within data at scale

Giuseppe Ciaburro

Regression analysis is a statistical process which enables prediction of relationships between variables. The predictions are based on the casual effect of one variable upon another. Regression techniques for modeling and analyzing are employed on large set of data in order to reveal hidden relationship among the variables.This book will give you a rundown explaining what regression analysis is, explaining you the process from scratch. The first few chapters give an understanding of what the different types of learning are – supervised and unsupervised, how these learnings differ from each other. We then move to covering the supervised learning in details covering the various aspects of regression analysis. The outline of chapters are arranged in a way that gives a feel of all the steps covered in a data science process – loading the training dataset, handling missing values, EDA on the dataset, transformations and feature engineering, model building, assessing the model fitting and performance, and finally making predictions on unseen datasets. Each chapter starts with explaining the theoretical concepts and once the reader gets comfortable with the theory, we move to the practical examples to support the understanding. The practical examples are illustrated using R code including the different packages in R such as R Stats, Caret and so on. Each chapter is a mix of theory and practical examples.By the end of this book you will know all the concepts and pain-points related to regression analysis, and you will be able to implement your learning in your projects.

Go Cookbook. Build modular, readable, and testable applications in Go

Aaron Torres

Go (a.k.a. Golang) is a statically-typed programming language first developed at Google. It is derived from C with additional features such as garbage collection, type safety, dynamic-typing capabilities, additional built-in types, and a large standard library.This book takes off where basic tutorials on the language leave off. You can immediately put into practice some of the more advanced concepts and libraries offered by the language while avoiding some of the common mistakes for new Go developers. The book covers basic type and error handling. It explores applications that interact with users, such as websites, command-line tools, or via the file system. It demonstrates how to handle advanced topics such as parallelism, distributed systems, and performance tuning. Lastly, it finishes with reactive and serverless programming in Go.

NGINX Cookbook. Over 70 recipes for real-world configuration, deployment, and performance

Tim Butler

NGINX Cookbook covers the basics of configuring NGINX as a web server for use with common web frameworks such as WordPress and Ruby on Rails, through to utilization as a reverse proxy. Designed as a go-to reference guide, this book will give you practical answers based on real-world deployments to get you up and running quickly. Recipes have also been provided for multiple SSL configurations, different logging scenarios, practical rewrites, and multiple load balancing scenarios. Advanced topics include covering bandwidth management, Docker container usage, performance tuning, OpenResty, and the NGINX Plus commercial features.By the time you've read this book, you will be able to adapt and use a wide variety of NGINX implementations to solve any problems you have.

Frank Kane's Taming Big Data with Apache Spark and Python. Real-world examples to help you analyze large datasets with Apache Spark

Frank Kane

Frank Kane’s Taming Big Data with Apache Spark and Python is your companion to learning Apache Spark in a hands-on manner. Frank will start you off by teaching you how to set up Spark on a single system or on a cluster, and you’ll soon move on to analyzing large data sets using Spark RDD, and developing and running effective Spark jobs quickly using Python.Apache Spark has emerged as the next big thing in the Big Data domain – quickly rising from an ascending technology to an established superstar in just a matter of years. Spark allows you to quickly extract actionable insights from large amounts of data, on a real-time basis, making it an essential tool in many modern businesses. Frank has packed this book with over 15 interactive, fun-filled examples relevant to the real world, and he will empower you to understand the Spark ecosystem and implement production-grade real-time Spark projects with ease.

Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook. Transform your game into a visually stunning masterpiece with over 70 recipes - Third Edition

John P. Doran, Alan Zucconi

Since their introduction to Unity, shaders have been seen as notoriously difficult to understand and implement in games. Complex mathematics has always stood in the way of creating your own shaders and attaining the level of realism you crave.Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook changes that by giving you a recipe-based guide to creating shaders using Unity. It will show you everything you need to know about vectors, how lighting is constructed with them, and how textures are used to create complex effects without the heavy math.This book starts by teaching you how to use shaders without writing code with the post-processing stack. Then, you’ll learn how to write shaders from scratch, build up essential lighting, and finish by creating stunning screen effects just like those in high-quality 3D and mobile games. You'll discover techniques, such as normal mapping, image-based lighting, and animating your models inside a shader. We'll explore how to use physically based rendering to treat light the way it behaves in the real world. At the end, we’ll even look at Unity 2018’s new Shader Graph system.With this book, what seems like a dark art today will be second nature by tomorrow.

Kubernetes for Serverless Applications. Implement FaaS by effectively deploying, managing, monitoring, and orchestrating serverless applications using Kubernetes

Russ McKendrick

Kubernetes has established itself as the standard platform for container management, orchestration, and deployment. It has been adopted by companies such as Google, its original developers, and Microsoft as an integral part of their public cloud platforms, so that you can develop for Kubernetes and not worry about being locked into a single vendor.This book will initially start by introducing serverless functions. Then you will configure tools such as Minikube to run Kubernetes. Once you are up-and-running, you will install and configure Kubeless, your first step towards running Function as a Service (FaaS) on Kubernetes. Then you will gradually move towards running Fission, a framework used for managing serverless functions on Kubernetes environments. Towards the end of the book, you will also work with Kubernetes functions on public and private clouds. By the end of this book, we will have mastered using Function as a Service on Kubernetes environments.

Hands-On Big Data Analytics with PySpark. Analyze large datasets and discover techniques for testing, immunizing, and parallelizing Spark jobs

James Cross, Rudy Lai, Bartłomiej Potaczek

Apache Spark is an open source parallel-processing framework that has been around for quite some time now. One of the many uses of Apache Spark is for data analytics applications across clustered computers. In this book, you will not only learn how to use Spark and the Python API to create high-performance analytics with big data, but also discover techniques for testing, immunizing, and parallelizing Spark jobs.You will learn how to source data from all popular data hosting platforms, including HDFS, Hive, JSON, and S3, and deal with large datasets with PySpark to gain practical big data experience. This book will help you work on prototypes on local machines and subsequently go on to handle messy data in production and at scale. This book covers installing and setting up PySpark, RDD operations, big data cleaning and wrangling, and aggregating and summarizing data into useful reports. You will also learn how to implement some practical and proven techniques to improve certain aspects of programming and administration in Apache Spark.By the end of the book, you will be able to build big data analytical solutions using the various PySpark offerings and also optimize them effectively.

Hands-On Full Stack Development with Go. Build full stack web applications with Go, React, Gin, and GopherJS

Mina Andrawos

The Go programming language has been rapidly adopted by developers for building web applications. With its impressive performance and ease of development, Go enjoys the support of a wide variety of open source frameworks, for building scalable and high-performant web services and apps. Hands-On Full Stack Development with Go is a comprehensive guide that covers all aspects of full stack development with Go.This clearly written, example-rich book begins with a practical exposure to Go development and moves on to build a frontend with the popular React framework. From there, you will build RESTful web APIs utilizing the Gin framework. After that, we will dive deeper into important software backend concepts, such as connecting to the database via an ORM, designing routes for your services, securing your services, and even charging credit cards via the popular Stripe API. We will also cover how to test, and benchmark your applications efficiently in a production environment. In the concluding chapters, we will cover isomorphic developments in pure Go by learning about GopherJS. As you progress through the book, you'll gradually build a musical instrument online store application from scratch.By the end of the book, you will be confident in taking on full stack web applications in Go.