The Photographer's Guide to Adobe Lightroom. Learn industry-standard best practices and techniques to get the best out of the latest version of Lightroom Classic

Marcin Lewandowski

It takes talent to be a great photographer, but in the digital era, it also takes a level of technical proficiency. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic was designed as a one-stop solution for photographers to perfect their final products on a desktop-focused workflow, which includes local storage of your photos in files and folders on your computer. Knowing how to efficiently navigate through Lightroom means that you’ll be able to concentrate on being creative instead of wondering “what does this button do”.Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples, you will begin with importing photographs into Lightroom. You’ll focus on how to sort through, sequence, develop, and export ready files in various formats, or even design a book and create gallery-ready prints. Next, you will learn how to make informed decisions within Lightroom and how to approach your work depending on the set of photographs you are working on. This guide also illustrates real-life usage and workflow examples that are not just for aspiring professionals, but also for artists and amateurs who are still getting to grips with the technical side of photography.By the end of this book, you'll be confident in importing, editing, sorting, developing, and delivering your photos like a professional.

Modern CMake for C++. Effortlessly build cutting-edge C++ code and deliver high-quality solutions - Second Edition

Rafał Świdziński, Alexander Kushnir

Modern CMake for C++ isn't just another reference book, or a repackaging of the documentation, but a blueprint to bridging the gap between learning C++ and being able to use it in a professional setting. It's an end-to-end guide to the automation of complex tasks, including building, testing, and packaging software.This second edition is significantly rewritten, restructured and refreshed with latest additions to CMake, such as support of C++20 Modules.In this book, you'll not only learn how to use the CMake language in CMake projects but also discover how to make those projects maintainable, elegant, and clean. As you progress, you'll dive into the structure of source directories, building targets, and packages, all while learning how to compile and link executables and libraries. You'll also gain a deeper understanding of how those processes work and how to optimize builds in CMake for the best results. You'll discover how to use external dependencies in your project – third-party libraries, testing frameworks, program analysis tools, and documentation generators. Finally, you'll gain profi ciency in exporting, installing, and packaging for internal and external purposes.By the end of this book, you'll be able to use CMake confi dently at a professional level.

Mastering Adobe Photoshop Elements. Bring out the best in your images using Adobe Photoshop Elements 2024 - Sixth Edition

Robin Nichols

Dive into the world of digital photo editing with this latest edition, crafted by Robin Nichols, a seasoned photographer and digital imaging expert, which brings the latest Photoshop Elements 2024 to your fingertips. With a unique blend of in-depth tutorials and practical applications, this book is an essential resource for photographers at all levels.It introduces new features like Dark Mode, Match Color, and Photo Reels, along with advanced techniques like layering and artistic effects. The book also addresses common user feedback from previous editions, ensuring a refined and user-friendly experience. Elements 2024 extends its AI capabilities by simplifying complex editing processes. Learn to stitch widescreen panoramas, remove people from backgrounds, de-focus backgrounds, re-compose images, and even create a range of calendars and greeting cards for your friends and family.Take your prowess to the next level by learning how to correct optical distortion, re-shape images, exploit layers, layer masking, and sharpening techniques—create the perfect picture or imaginative fantasy illustration. You’ll also learn the online realms of animation, video creation, and third-party plug-ins.By the end of this book, you'll learn how to leverage the incredible features of Photoshop Elements 2024 with complete confidence.

Python for Finance Cookbook. Over 50 recipes for applying modern Python libraries to financial data analysis

Eryk Lewinson

Python is one of the most popular programming languages used in the financial industry, with a huge set of accompanying libraries. In this book, you'll cover different ways of downloading financial data and preparing it for modeling. You'll calculate popular indicators used in technical analysis, such as Bollinger Bands, MACD, RSI, and backtest automatic trading strategies. Next, you'll cover time series analysis and models, such as exponential smoothing, ARIMA, and GARCH (including multivariate specifications), before exploring the popular CAPM and the Fama-French three-factor model. You'll then discover how to optimize asset allocation and use Monte Carlo simulations for tasks such as calculating the price of American options and estimating the Value at Risk (VaR). In later chapters, you'll work through an entire data science project in the financial domain. You'll also learn how to solve the credit card fraud and default problems using advanced classifiers such as random forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and stacked models. You'll then be able to tune the hyperparameters of the models and handle class imbalance. Finally, you'll focus on learning how to use deep learning (PyTorch) for approaching financial tasks.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to effectively analyze financial data using a recipe-based approach.

Building an RPG with Unreal 4.x. Get to grips with building the foundations of an RPG using Unreal Engine 4.x

Alan R. Stagner, Steve Santello

Now that Unreal Engine 4 has become one of the most cutting edge game engines in the world, developers are looking for the best ways of creating games of any genre in the engine. This book will lay out the foundation of creating a turn-based RPG in Unreal Engine 4.12. The book starts by walking you through creating a turn-based battle system that can hold commands for party members and enemies. You’ll get your hands dirty by creating NPCs such as shop owners, and important mechanics, that make up every RPG such as a currency system, inventory, dialogue, and character statistics. Although this book specifically focuses on the creation of a turn-based RPG, there are a variety of topics that can be utilized when creating many other types of genres.By the end of the book, you will be able to build upon core RPG framework elements to create your own game experience.

R Graphs Cookbook. Over 70 recipes for building and customizing publication-quality visualizations of powerful and stunning R graphs

Jaynal Abedin, Jaynal Abedin, Hrishi Mittal

Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects. Build immersive, real-world VR applications using UE4, C++, and Unreal Blueprints

Kevin Mack, Robert Ruud

Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) is a powerful tool for developing VR games and applications. With its visual scripting language, Blueprint, and built-in support for all major VR headsets, it's a perfect tool for designers, artists, and engineers to realize their visions in VR. This book will guide you step-by-step through a series of projects that teach essential concepts and techniques for VR development in UE4. You will begin by learning how to think about (and design for) VR and then proceed to set up a development environment. A series of practical projects follows, taking you through essential VR concepts. Through these exercises, you'll learn how to set up UE4 projects that run effectively in VR, how to build player locomotion schemes, and how to use hand controllers to interact with the world. You'll then move on to create user interfaces in 3D space, use the editor's VR mode to build environments directly in VR, and profile/optimize worlds you've built. Finally, you'll explore more advanced topics, such as displaying stereo media in VR, networking in Unreal, and using plugins to extend the engine. Throughout, this book focuses on creating a deeper understanding of why the relevant tools and techniques work as they do, so you can use the techniques and concepts learned here as a springboard for further learning and exploration in VR.

Moodle 1.9 Testing and Assessment. Develop and evaluate quizzes and tests using Moodle modules

Moodle Trust, Jason Myrick

Moodle is a free Course Management System (CMS), which is a web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. Moodle also has many effective modules and assessment techniques for testing that can be used for any subject. Computer-based testing is inevitable in any online teaching course. As you consider the benefits of computer-based testing you will want to easily create tests and instantaneously assess them.Moodle 1.9 Testing and Assessment puts together a variety of modules and activities that allow us to easily create and deliver a variety of tests on any subject. It is a step-by-step guide that will assist you to develop and assess simple as well as complex quizzes and tests.You will initially learn to create different types of questions such as short answer questions, multiple choice questions, and so on. After you have learned to create questions, you will learn to integrate all of them in a Moodle quiz to create a complete test by tweaking the various options. Next you will learn to create and set up a Lesson, which you can use to create simple vocabulary or flash card tests or complex tests.You will learn to test and assess students through work submitted using Moodle Workshop. This module also provides an opportunity for self- and peer-assessment of your student's work. Then you will learn skill-specific tests such as listening, reading, speaking, and writing tests that will help you to judge a person's ability in a particular field. At the end of this book you will learn how you can grade tests using Moodle Gradebook.This hands-on guide helps you to establish optimal tests that can be graded using Moodle modules.

Instant jQuery Boilerplate for Plugins. Get started with jQuery plugin development with this rapid-paced guide

Jonathan Fielding

jQuery plugins helps you to extend jQuery's prototype object. jQuery plugins are used to achieve a specific task with a collection of elements, they are modular and reusable across several projects.Instant jQuery Boilerplate for Plugins is a hands on guide to writing your own plugins. The recipes in this book will guide you through the steps of plug-in development.Each recipe is a short tutorial within itself that will help you explore different options available within jQuery by providing a clear explanation on what jQuery Boilerplate has to offer. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to write a plugin and will be ready to start writing plugins of your own.

Mastering .NET Machine Learning. Use machine learning in your .NET applications

Jamie Dixon

.Net is one of the widely used platforms for developing applications. With the meteoric rise of Machine learning, developers are now keen on finding out how can they make their .Net applications smarter. Also, .NET developers are interested into moving into the world of devices and how to apply machine learning techniques to, well, machines.This book is packed with real-world examples to easily use machine learning techniques in your business applications. You will begin with introduction to F# and prepare yourselves for machine learning using .NET framework. You will be writing a simple linear regression model using an example which predicts sales of a product. Forming a base with the regression model, you will start using machine learning libraries available in .NET framework such as Math.NET, Numl.NET and Accord.NET with the help of a sample application. You will then move on to writing multiple linear regressions and logistic regressions.You will learn what is open data and the awesomeness of type providers. Next, you are going to address some of the issues that we have been glossing over so far and take a deep dive into obtaining, cleaning, and organizing our data. You will compare the utility of building a KNN and Naive Bayes model to achieve best possible results.Implementation of Kmeans and PCA using Accord.NET and Numl.NET libraries is covered with the help of an example application. We will then look at many of issues confronting creating real-world machine learning models like overfitting and how to combat them using confusion matrixes, scaling, normalization, and feature selection. You will now enter into the world of Neural Networks and move your line of business application to a hybrid scientific application. After you have covered all the above machine learning models, you will see how to deal with very large datasets using MBrace and how to deploy machine learning models to Internet of Thing (IoT) devices so that the machine can learn and adapt on the fly.

Protocol Buffers Handbook. Getting deeper into Protobuf internals and its usage

Clément Jean

Explore how Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) serialize structured data and provides a language-neutral, platform-neutral, and extensible solution. With this guide to mastering Protobuf, you'll build your skills to effectively serialize, transmit, and manage data across diverse platforms and languages.This book will help you enter the world of Protocol Buffers by unraveling the intricate nuances of Protobuf syntax and showing you how to define complex data structures. As you progress, you’ll learn schema evolution, ensuring seamless compatibility as your projects evolve. The book also covers advanced topics such as custom options and plugins, allowing you to tailor validation processes to your specific requirements. You’ll understand how to automate project builds using cutting-edge tools such as Buf and Bazel, streamlining your development workflow. With hands-on projects in Go and Python programming, you’ll learn how to practically apply Protobuf concepts. Later chapters will show you how to integrate data interchange capabilities across different programming languages, enabling efficient collaboration and system interoperability.By the end of this book, you’ll have a solid understanding of Protobuf internals, enabling you to discern when and how to use and redefine your approach to data serialization.

Learning Unreal Engine Game Development. A step-by-step guide that paves the way for developing fantastic games with Unreal Engine 4

Joanna Lee

Unreal Engine 4 is a powerful game development engine that provides rich functionalities to create 2D and 3D games across multiple platforms. Many people know what a game is and they play games every day, but how many of them know how to create a game? Unreal Engine technology powers hundreds of games, and thousands of individuals have built careers and companies around skills developed using this engine.Learning Unreal Engine 4 Game Development starts with small, simple game ideas and playable projects that you can actually finish. The book first teaches you the basics of using Unreal Engine to create a simple game level. Then, you'll learn how to add details such as actors, animation, effects, and so on to the game. The complexity will increase over the chapters and the examples chosen will help you learn a wide variety of game development techniques. This book aims to equip you with the confidence and skills to design and build your own games using Unreal Engine 4. By the end of this book, you'll have learnt about the entire Unreal suite and know how to successfully create fun, simple games.

Instant Creating Data Models with PowerPivot How-to. Build better business intelligence with this practical guide to creating Excel data models with PowerPivot

Leo Taehyung Lee, Taehyung Lee

Microsoft PowerPivot is a free software designed to enhance Microsoft Excel. It allows the user to make extensive use of his/her computer's powers to draw data from various sources, do analysis across millions of rows of data, and present results in a very unique format.Instant Creating Data Models with PowerPivot How-to is a concise and to-the-point guide that helps you get a jump start on using this strong business intelligence tool, while still working in an environment similar to Excel. You will begin with data generation and manipulation, learning a new feature at each step by building onto the old file, and ultimately creating a comprehensive file.Instant Creating Data Models with PowerPivot How-to will guide the user through database installation, importing data from various sources, creating pivot charts and tables, utilizing a unique feature of PowerPivot called slicers,adding custom columns, and setting custom relationships between data to generate the ultimate customized dataset for analysis. By the end of the book and all the sections of Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel, the reader will be fully experienced and ready to utilize this powerful software.

Power Up Your PowToon Studio Project. The ultimate PowToon project guide – get hints, tips, and ideas to turbocharge your PowToon Studio project

Bruce Graham

Backbone.js Patterns and Best Practices. Improve your Backbone.js skills with this step-by-step guide to patterns and best practice. It will help you reduce boilerplate in your code and provide plenty of open source plugin solutions to common problems along the way

Swarnendu De

The Art of Micro Frontends. Build websites using compositional UIs that grow naturally as your application scales

Florian Rappl, Lothar Schöttner

Micro frontend is a web architecture for frontend development borrowed from the idea of microservices in software development, where each module of the frontend is developed and shipped in isolation to avoid complexity and a single point of failure for your frontend.Complete with hands-on tutorials, projects, and self-assessment questions, this easy-to-follow guide will take you through the patterns available for implementing a micro frontend solution. You’ll learn about micro frontends in general, the different architecture styles and their areas of use, how to prepare teams for the change to micro frontends, as well as how to adjust the UI design for scalability. Starting with the simplest variants of micro frontend architectures, the book progresses from static approaches to fully dynamic solutions that allow maximum scalability with faster release cycles. In the concluding chapters, you'll reinforce the knowledge you’ve gained by working on different case studies relating to micro frontends.By the end of this book, you'll be able to decide if and how micro frontends should be implemented to achieve scalability for your user interface (UI).

Neo4j Graph Data Modeling. Design efficient and flexible databases by optimizing the power of Neo4j

Mahesh Lal, Mahesh K Lal

Learn AWS Serverless Computing. A beginner's guide to using AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and services from Amazon Web Services

Scott Patterson

Serverless computing is a way to run your code without having to provision or manage servers. Amazon Web Services provides serverless services that you can use to build and deploy cloud-native applications. Starting with the basics of AWS Lambda, this book takes you through combining Lambda with other services from AWS, such as Amazon API Gateway, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Step Functions. You’ll learn how to write, run, and test Lambda functions using examples in Node.js, Java, Python, and C# before you move on to developing and deploying serverless APIs efficiently using the Serverless Framework. In the concluding chapters, you’ll discover tips and best practices for leveraging Serverless Framework to increase your development productivity. By the end of this book, you’ll have become well-versed in building, securing, and running serverless applications using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda without having to manage any servers.

Domain-Driven Design with Java - A Practitioner's Guide. Create simple, elegant, and valuable software solutions for complex business problems

Premanand Chandrasekaran, Karthik Krishnan, Neal Ford, Brandon Byars, ...

Domain-Driven Design (DDD) makes available a set of techniques and patterns that enable domain experts, architects, and developers to work together to decompose complex business problems into a set of well-factored, collaborating, and loosely coupled subsystems.This practical guide will help you as a developer and architect to put your knowledge to work in order to create elegant software designs that are enjoyable to work with and easy to reason about. You'll begin with an introduction to the concepts of domain-driven design and discover various ways to apply them in real-world scenarios. You'll also appreciate how DDD is extremely relevant when creating cloud native solutions that employ modern techniques such as event-driven microservices and fine-grained architectures. As you advance through the chapters, you'll get acquainted with core DDD’s strategic design concepts such as the ubiquitous language, context maps, bounded contexts, and tactical design elements like aggregates and domain models and events. You'll understand how to apply modern, lightweight modeling techniques such as business value canvas, Wardley mapping, domain storytelling, and event storming, while also learning how to test-drive the system to create solutions that exhibit high degrees of internal quality.By the end of this software design book, you'll be able to architect, design, and implement robust, resilient, and performant distributed software solutions.

Hands-On Low-Code Application Development with Salesforce. Build customized CRM applications that solve business challenges in just a few clicks

Enrico Murru

Low-code platforms allow users to focus on business logic to create solutions without getting trapped in programming complexities. Thanks to its powerful features for designing, developing, and deploying apps without having to hand-code, Salesforce is at the forefront of the low-code development revolution. This book will guide you in building creative applications for solving your business problems using the declarative framework provided by Salesforce.You’ll start by learning how to design your business data model with custom objects, fields, formulas, and validation rules, all secured by the Salesforce security model. You’ll then explore tools such as Workflow, Process Builder, Lightning Flow, and Actions that will help you to automate your business processes with ease. This book also shows you how to use Lightning App Builder to build personalized UIs for your Salesforce applications, explains the value of creating community pages for your organization, and teaches you how to customize them with Experience Builder. Finally, you'll work with the sandbox model, deploy your solutions, and deliver an effective release management strategy.By the end of this Salesforce book, you’ll be ready to customize Salesforce CRM to meet your business requirements by creating unique solutions without writing a single line of code.

Strategizing Continuous Delivery in the Cloud. Implement continuous delivery using modern cloud-native technology

Garima Bajpai, Thomas Schuetz

Many organizations are embracing cloud technology to remain competitive, but implementing and adopting development processes while modernizing a cloud-based ecosystem can be challenging.Strategizing Continuous Delivery in Cloud helps you modernize continuous delivery and achieve infrastructure-application convergence in the cloud. You’ll learn the differences between cloud-based and traditional delivery approaches and develop a tailored strategy. You’ll discover how to secure your cloud delivery environment, ensure software security, run different test types, and test in the pre-production and production stages.You’ll also get to grips with the prerequisites for onboarding cloud-based continuous delivery for organizational and technical aspects. Then, you’ll explore key aspects of readiness to overcome core challenges in your cloud journey, including GitOps, progressive delivery controllers, feature flagging, differences between cloud-based and traditional tools, and implementing cloud chaos engineering.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to select the right cloud environment and technologies for CD and be able to explore techniques for implementing CD in the cloud.

Applying Math with Python. Practical recipes for solving computational math problems using Python programming and its libraries

Sam Morley

Python, one of the world's most popular programming languages, has a number of powerful packages to help you tackle complex mathematical problems in a simple and efficient way. These core capabilities help programmers pave the way for building exciting applications in various domains, such as machine learning and data science, using knowledge in the computational mathematics domain.The book teaches you how to solve problems faced in a wide variety of mathematical fields, including calculus, probability, statistics and data science, graph theory, optimization, and geometry. You'll start by developing core skills and learning about packages covered in Python’s scientific stack, including NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib. As you advance, you'll get to grips with more advanced topics of calculus, probability, and networks (graph theory). After you gain a solid understanding of these topics, you'll discover Python's applications in data science and statistics, forecasting, geometry, and optimization. The final chapters will take you through a collection of miscellaneous problems, including working with specific data formats and accelerating code.By the end of this book, you'll have an arsenal of practical coding solutions that can be used and modified to solve a wide range of practical problems in computational mathematics and data science.

Visual Basic Quickstart Guide. Improve your programming skills and design applications that range from basic utilities to complex software

Aspen Olmsted

Whether you’re an absolute beginner or an experienced developer looking to learn the Visual Basic language, this book takes a hands-on approach to guide you through the process. From the very first chapters, you'll delve into writing programs, exploring core concepts such as data types, decision branching, and iteration. Additionally, you’ll get to grips with working with data structures, file I/O, and essential object-oriented principles like inheritance and polymorphism.This book goes beyond the basics to equip you with the skills to read and write code across the entire VB family, spanning VB Script, VBA, VB Classic, and VB.NET, enabling you to handle legacy code maintenance with ease.With clear explanations, practical examples, and hands-on exercises, this book empowers you to tackle real-world software development tasks, whether you're enhancing existing projects or embarking on new ones. It addresses common challenges like distinguishing between the variations of the VB programming language to help you choose the right one for your projects.Don't let VB's extensive legacy daunt you; embrace it with this comprehensive guide that equips you with practical, up-to-date coding skills to overcome the challenges presented by Visual Basic's rich history of over two decades.

Microsoft Power Apps Cookbook. Apply low-code recipes to solve everyday business challenges and become a Power Apps pro - Second Edition

Eickhel Mendoza

Power Apps is a low-code platform owned by Microsoft. With this platform, you can create solutions to solve your business needs while integrating with other components of the Power Platform, such as Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft Power BI, and others. This book is a handy solution guide to meet many organizational requirements.Microsoft Power Apps Cookbook, Second Edition, takes a pragmatic approach where every business scenario is presented in a quick, practical, and action-oriented recipe. You will be able to use these instant solutions in your development environment and customize your business apps to meet challenging business needs. This will help you handle real-world scenarios and experiences to give you a head start in your Power Apps projects. You will discover various aspects of Power Apps, from building canvas apps, designing model-driven solutions, extending apps with custom connectors, and integrating apps with other platforms, to the pro-developer side including Power Apps Component Framework and creating website experiences for external users with Power Pages.By the end of this Microsoft Power Apps book, you will have gained experience in developing applications using the Power Apps platform and all its features.