Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On. A practical and easy-to-follow guide to RL from Q-learning and DQNs to PPO and RLHF - Third Edition

Maxim Lapan

Start your journey into reinforcement learning (RL) and reward yourself with the third edition of Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On. This book takes you through the basics of RL to more advanced concepts with the help of various applications, including game playing, discrete optimization, stock trading, and web browser navigation. By walking you through landmark research papers in the fi eld, this deep RL book will equip you with practical knowledge of RL and the theoretical foundation to understand and implement most modern RL papers. The book retains its approach of providing concise and easy-to-follow explanations from the previous editions. You'll work through practical and diverse examples, from grid environments and games to stock trading and RL agents in web environments, to give you a well-rounded understanding of RL, its capabilities, and its use cases. You'll learn about key topics, such as deep Q-networks (DQNs), policy gradient methods, continuous control problems, and highly scalable, non-gradient methods. If you want to learn about RL through a practical approach using OpenAI Gym and PyTorch, concise explanations, and the incremental development of topics, then Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On, Third Edition, is your ideal companion

Groovy 2 Cookbook. Java and Groovy go together like ham and eggs, and this book is a great opportunity to learn how to exploit Groovy 2 to the full. Packed with recipes, both intermediate and advanced, it's a great way to speed up and modernize your programming

Luciano Fiandesio, Andrey Adamovich, Andrey Adamovich And Luciano Fiandesio

Get up to speed with Groovy, a language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that integrates features of both object-oriented and functional programming. This book will show you the powerful features of Groovy 2 applied to real-world scenarios and how the dynamic nature of the language makes it very simple to tackle problems that would otherwise require hours or days of research and implementation.Groovy 2 Cookbook contains a vast number of recipes covering many facets of today's programming landscape. From language-specific topics such as closures and metaprogramming, to more advanced applications of Groovy flexibility such as DSL and testing techniques, this book gives you quick solutions to everyday problems.The recipes in this book start from the basics of installing Groovy and running your first scripts and continue with progressively more advanced examples that will help you to take advantage of the language's amazing features.Packed with hundreds of tried-and-true Groovy recipes, Groovy 2 Cookbook includes code segments covering many specialized APIs to work with files and collections, manipulate XML, work with REST services and JSON, create asynchronous tasks, and more. But Groovy does more than just ease traditional Java development: it brings modern programming features to the Java platform like closures, duck-typing, and metaprogramming.In this new book, you'll find code examples that you can use in your projects right away along with a discussion about how and why the solution works. Focusing on what's useful and tricky, Groovy 2 Cookbook offers a wealth of useful code for all Java and Groovy programmers, not just advanced practitioners.

Learning RStudio for R Statistical Computing

Mark P.J. van der Loo, RStudio Inc, Edwin de Jonge, Mark van der Loo

Data is coming at us faster, dirtier, and at an ever increasing rate. The necessity to handle many, complex statistical analysis projects is hitting statisticians and analysts across the globe. This book will show you how to deal with it like never before, thus providing an edge and improving productivity.Learning RStudio for R Statistical Computing will teach you how to quickly and efficiently create and manage statistical analysis projects, import data, develop R scripts, and generate reports and graphics. R developers will learn about package development, coding principles, and version control with RStudio.This book will help you to learn and understand RStudio features to effectively perform statistical analysis and reporting, code editing, and R development.The book starts with a quick introduction where you will learn to load data, perform simple analysis, plot a graph, and generate automatic reports. You will then be able to explore the available features for effective coding, graphical analysis, R project management, report generation, and even project management.Learning RStudio for R Statistical Computing is stuffed with feature-rich and easy-to-understand examples, through step-by-step instructions helping you to quickly master the most popular IDE for R development.

Kivy Cookbook. Enhance your skills in developing multi-touch applications with Kivy

Hugo Solis

Deep Reinforcement Learning with Python. Master classic RL, deep RL, distributional RL, inverse RL, and more with OpenAI Gym and TensorFlow - Second Edition

Sudharsan Ravichandiran

With significant enhancements in the quality and quantity of algorithms in recent years, this second edition of Hands-On Reinforcement Learning with Python has been revamped into an example-rich guide to learning state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) and deep RL algorithms with TensorFlow 2 and the OpenAI Gym toolkit.In addition to exploring RL basics and foundational concepts such as Bellman equation, Markov decision processes, and dynamic programming algorithms, this second edition dives deep into the full spectrum of value-based, policy-based, and actor-critic RL methods. It explores state-of-the-art algorithms such as DQN, TRPO, PPO and ACKTR, DDPG, TD3, and SAC in depth, demystifying the underlying math and demonstrating implementations through simple code examples.The book has several new chapters dedicated to new RL techniques, including distributional RL, imitation learning, inverse RL, and meta RL. You will learn to leverage stable baselines, an improvement of OpenAI’s baseline library, to effortlessly implement popular RL algorithms. The book concludes with an overview of promising approaches such as meta-learning and imagination augmented agents in research.By the end, you will become skilled in effectively employing RL and deep RL in your real-world projects.

AWS for Solutions Architects. The definitive guide to AWS Solutions Architecture for migrating to, building, scaling, and succeeding in the cloud - Second Edition

Saurabh Shrivastava, Neelanjali Srivastav, Dr. Siddhartha Choubey, Ph.D, ...

The second edition of AWS for Solutions Architects provides a practical guide to designing cloud solutions that align with industry best practices. This updated edition covers the AWS Well-Architected Framework, core design principles, and cloud-native patterns to help you build secure, high-performance, and cost-effective architectures.Gain a deep understanding of AWS networking, hybrid cloud connectivity, and edge deployments. Explore big data processing with EMR, Glue, Kinesis, and MSK, enabling you to extract valuable insights from data efficiently. New chapters introduce CloudOps, machine learning, IoT, and blockchain, equipping you with the knowledge to develop modern cloud solutions.Learn how to optimize AWS storage, implement containerization strategies, and design scalable data lakes. Whether working on simple configurations or complex enterprise architectures, this guide provides the expertise needed to solve real-world cloud challenges and build reliable, high-performing AWS solutions.

Go Programming - From Beginner to Professional. Learn everything you need to build modern software using Go - Second Edition

Samantha Coyle

Go Programming – From Beginner to Professional is a comprehensive guide that takes your proficiency in the Go programming language from novice to expert. Starting with fundamental concepts, this book covers variables, command-line tools, and working with data before delving into advanced concepts, including error handling, interfaces, and generics, harnessing Go’s latest features through hands-on exercises. Along the way, you’ll learn to structure projects using Go modules, manage packages effectively, and master debugging techniques.As you progress, you’ll get to grips with practical application-centric aspects such as command-line programming, file manipulation, and working with SQL databases. Additionally, the book explores web server development, RESTful APIs, and utilizing the Go HTTP client to interact with web applications. Further enhancing your Go skills, you’ll learn concurrent programming, testing methodologies, Go tools, and how to deploy applications in the cloud. Throughout the book, you’ll uncover Go’s hidden gems and gain insights into time manipulation, best practices, and more.By the end of this book, you’ll have worked through practical exercises and activities that’ll equip you with the knowledge and skills needed to excel as a proficient Go developer, primed for success in real-world projects.

The Oracle Universal Content Management Handbook. Build, Administer, and Manage Oracle Stellent UCM Solutions

Dmitri Khanine

Oracle UCM is a world-leading Enterprise Content Management platform. From Document Management, Web, Records, and more—Oracle has got all your business needs covered. Oracle UCM enables your organization to efficiently manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents.Written by Oracle ACE Dmitri Khanine, this book is a complete practical guide to building an ECM system and successfully configuring, administering, and operating it. It also shows you how to efficiently manage your organization's content and customize the UCM to fit your needs.This book wastes no time in getting you up and running and dives straight into the installation of the content server in Chapter 1. In the second chapter, you will master all the major controls and the admin interface. Metadata—a very important ingredient of any ECM—is thoroughly covered in Chapter 3. The book then moves on to the important tasks of securing your ECM system, configuring and managing workflows, and understanding and implementing virtual folders. The book also gives you an under-the-hood view of Stellent in Chapter 7. In the later chapters, you will learn how to migrate content like a pro and easily customize Oracle ECM. A bonus addition to the book is the final chapter, which is an easy-to-follow primer on web content management.

Practical Data Analysis. Pandas, MongoDB, Apache Spark, and more - Second Edition

Hector Cuesta, Dr. Sampath Kumar

Beyond buzzwords like Big Data or Data Science, there are a great opportunities to innovate in many businesses using data analysis to get data-driven products. Data analysis involves asking many questions about data in order to discover insights and generate value for a product or a service.This book explains the basic data algorithms without the theoretical jargon, and you’ll get hands-on turning data into insights using machine learning techniques. We will perform data-driven innovation processing for several types of data such as text, Images, social network graphs, documents, and time series, showing you how to implement large data processing with MongoDB and Apache Spark.

The Data Science Workshop. Learn how you can build machine learning models and create your own real-world data science projects - Second Edition

Anthony So, Thomas V. Joseph, Robert Thas John, Andrew Worsley, ...

Where there’s data, there’s insight. With so much data being generated, there is immense scope to extract meaningful information that’ll boost business productivity and profitability. By learning to convert raw data into game-changing insights, you’ll open new career paths and opportunities.The Data Science Workshop begins by introducing different types of projects and showing you how to incorporate machine learning algorithms in them. You’ll learn to select a relevant metric and even assess the performance of your model. To tune the hyperparameters of an algorithm and improve its accuracy, you’ll get hands-on with approaches such as grid search and random search.Next, you’ll learn dimensionality reduction techniques to easily handle many variables at once, before exploring how to use model ensembling techniques and create new features to enhance model performance. In a bid to help you automatically create new features that improve your model, the book demonstrates how to use the automated feature engineering tool. You’ll also understand how to use the orchestration and scheduling workflow to deploy machine learning models in batch.By the end of this book, you’ll have the skills to start working on data science projects confidently. By the end of this book, you’ll have the skills to start working on data science projects confidently.

Salesforce Anti-Patterns. Build resilient Salesforce solutions using expert advice to create robust and efficient programs - Second Edition

Lars Malmqvist

While Salesforce is a powerful platform, it is prone to common pitfalls that can result in suboptimal performance, increased costs, and reduced user satisfaction. Known as anti-patterns, these problems can arise from design flaws, poor implementation choices, or a lack of understanding of best practices.Written by a seasoned Salesforce professional and 33-time certified Salesforce Certified Technical Architect, this revised edition will teach you how to identify and avoid common issues, optimize your Salesforce architecture, and ensure successful implementation. This second edition is updated with a comprehensive exploration of Salesforce, along with the addition of the most common Salesforce anti-patterns, providing in-depth analysis and practical solutions. These key learnings will further refine your skills to help you build more robust, scalable, and efficient Salesforce architectures. The chapters offer an expanded coverage of emerging technology trends such as AI and DevOps, updated examples, and additional case studies to ensure that you have the latest information and insights.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the confidence and expertise needed to design and implement effective Salesforce solutions.

Feature Management with LaunchDarkly. Discover safe ways to make live changes in your systems and master testing in production

Michael Gillett, John Kodumal

Over the past few years, DevOps has become the de facto approach for designing, building, and delivering software. Feature management is now extending the DevOps methodology to allow applications to change on demand and run experiments to validate the success of new features. If you want to make feature management happen, LaunchDarkly is the tool for you.This book explains how feature management is key to building modern software systems. Starting with the basics of LaunchDarkly and configuring simple feature flags to turn features on and off, you'll learn how simple functionality can be applied in more powerful ways with percentage-based rollouts, experimentation, and switches. You'll see how feature management can change the way teams work and how large projects, including migrations, are planned. Finally, you'll discover various uses of every part of the tool to gain mastery of LaunchDarkly. This includes tips and tricks for experimentation, identifying groups and segments of users, and investigating and debugging issues with specific users and feature flag evaluations.By the end of the book, you'll have gained a comprehensive understanding of LaunchDarkly, along with knowledge of the adoption of trunk-based development workflows and methods, multi-variant testing, and managing infrastructure changes and migrations.

Scratch 2.0 Beginner's Guide. Create digital stories, games, art, and animations through six unique projects

Michael Badger

Xamarin.Forms Projects. Build multiplatform mobile apps and a game from scratch using C# and Visual Studio 2019 - Second Edition

Daniel Hindrikes, Johan Karlsson, David Ortinau

Xamarin.Forms is a lightweight cross-platform development toolkit for building apps with a rich user interface. Improved and updated to cover the latest features of Xamarin.Forms, this second edition covers CollectionView and Shell, along with interesting concepts such as augmented reality (AR) and machine learning.Starting with an introduction to Xamarin and how it works, this book shares tips for choosing the type of development environment you should strive for when planning cross-platform mobile apps. You’ll build your first Xamarin.Forms app and learn how to use Shell to implement the app architecture. The book gradually increases the level of complexity of the projects, guiding you through creating apps ranging from a location tracker and weather map to an AR game and face recognition. As you advance, the book will take you through modern mobile development frameworks such as SQLite, .NET Core Mono, ARKit, and ARCore. You’ll be able to customize your apps for both Android and iOS platforms to achieve native-like performance and speed. The book is filled with engaging examples, so you can grasp essential concepts by writing code instead of reading through endless theory.By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to develop your own native apps with Xamarin.Forms and its associated technologies, such as .NET Core, Visual Studio 2019, and C#.

Data Analysis with R. A comprehensive guide to manipulating, analyzing, and visualizing data in R - Second Edition

Tony Fischetti

Frequently the tool of choice for academics, R has spread deep into the private sector and can be found in the production pipelines at some of the most advanced and successful enterprises. The power and domain-specificity of R allows the user to express complex analytics easily, quickly, and succinctly. Starting with the basics of R and statistical reasoning, this book dives into advanced predictive analytics, showing how to apply those techniques to real-world data though with real-world examples.Packed with engaging problems and exercises, this book begins with a review of R and its syntax with packages like Rcpp, ggplot2, and dplyr. From there, get to grips with the fundamentals of applied statistics and build on this knowledge to perform sophisticated and powerful analytics. Solve the difficulties relating to performing data analysis in practice and find solutions to working with messy data, large data, communicating results, and facilitating reproducibility.This book is engineered to be an invaluable resource through many stages of anyone’s career as a data analyst.

Haskell High Performance Programming. Write Haskell programs that are robust and fast enough to stand up to the needs of today

Samuli Thomasson

Haskell, with its power to optimize the code and its high performance, is a natural candidate for high performance programming. It is especially well suited to stacking abstractions high with a relatively low performance cost. This book addresses the challenges of writing efficient code with lazy evaluation and techniques often used to optimize the performance of Haskell programs. We open with an in-depth look at the evaluation of Haskell expressions and discuss optimization and benchmarking. You will learn to use parallelism and we'll explore the concept of streaming. We’ll demonstrate the benefits of running multithreaded and concurrent applications. Next we’ll guide you through various profiling tools that will help you identify performance issues in your program. We’ll end our journey by looking at GPGPU, Cloud and Functional Reactive Programming in Haskell. At the very end there is a catalogue of robust library recommendations with code samples.By the end of the book, you will be able to boost the performance of any app and prepare it to stand up to real-world punishment.

Developing IoT Projects with ESP32. Unlock the full Potential of ESP32 in IoT development to create production-grade smart devices - Second Edition

Vedat Ozan Oner

ESP32, a low-cost and energy-efficient system-on-a-chip microcontroller, has become the backbone of numerous WiFi devices, fueling IoT innovation. This book offers a holistic approach to building an IoT system from the ground up, ensuring secure data communication from sensors to cloud platforms, empowering you to create production-grade IoT solutions using the ESP32 SoC.Starting with IoT essentials supported by real-world use cases, this book takes you through the entire process of constructing an IoT device using ESP32. Each chapter introduces new dimensions to your IoT applications, covering sensor communication, the integration of prominent IoT libraries like LittleFS and LVGL, connectivity options via WiFi, security measures, cloud integration, and the visualization of real-time data using Grafana. Furthermore, a dedicated section explores AI/ML for embedded systems, guiding you through building and running ML applications with tinyML and ESP32-S3 to create state-of-the-art embedded products.This book adopts a hands-on approach, ensuring you can start building IoT solutions right from the beginning. Towards the end of the book, you'll tackle a full-scale Smart Home project, applying all the techniques you've learned in real-time.Embark on your journey to build secure, production-grade IoT systems with ESP32 today!

Twilio Cookbook. Over 70 easy-to-follow recipes, from exploring the key features of Twilio to building advanced telephony apps

Roger Stringer

Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Implementing ERP Systems

Alex Chow, Vjekoslav Babić, Laura Nicolas Lorente, David Studebaker, ...

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application used in all kinds of organizations around the world. It provides a great variety of functionality, out-of-the-box, in different topics such as accounting, sales, purchase processing, logistics, and manufacturing. Microsoft Dynamics NAV also allows companies to grow their applications by customizing solutions to meet specific requirements.This course is a hands-on tutorial on working with a real Dynamics NAV implementation. It begins by providing an insight into the different tools available to migrate data from client legacy systems into Microsoft Dynamics NAV. If you are already live with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, you will learn about upgrades and what to expect from them. We’ll also show you how to implement additional or expanding functionalities within your existing Microsoft Dynamics NAV installation, perform data analysis, debug error messages, and implement free third-party add-ons to your existing installation. From here, you will be introduced to integrated development tools to make you a highly productive developer in the NAV environment.The course will serve as a comprehensive reference guide, complementing NAV's Help files. You will find this course really useful if you want to evaluate Microsoft Dynamics NAV's development capabilities or need to manage NAV-based projects. Additionally, you will also learn about the NAV application structure, the C/SIDE development environment, the C/AL language, the construction and uses of each object type, and how it all fits together. Moving on, you will be guided through the NAV way of solving problems. You will be introduced to patterns and the software NAV architecture and will then build an example application. Then, you will walk through the details of architectural patterns, design patterns, and implementation patterns and will also learn about anti-patterns and handling legacy code. You will learn how to build solutions using patterns. The course offers premium, highly practical content on this recently released version of Dynamics NAV, and includes material from the following Packt books : 1. Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV - Third Edition 2. Programming Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV 3. Learning Dynamics NAV Patterns

Unity Game Development Scripting. Write efficient C# scripts to create modular key game elements that are usable for any kind of Unity project

Kyle D'Aoust

Python Scripting in Blender. Extend the power of Blender using Python to create objects, animations, and effective add-ons

Paolo Acampora

Blender, a powerful open source 3D software, can be extended and powered up using the Python programming language. This book teaches you how to automate laborious operations using scripts, and expand the set of available commands, graphic interfaces, tools, and event responses, which will enable you to add custom features to meet your needs and bring your creative ideas to life.The book begins by covering essential Python concepts and showing you how to create a basic add-on. You’ll then gain a solid understanding of the entities that affect the look of Blender’s objects such as modifiers, constraints, and materials. As you advance, you’ll get to grips with the animation system in Blender and learn how to set up its behavior using Python. The examples, tools, patterns, and best practices present throughout the book will familiarize you with the Python API and build your knowledge base, along with enabling you to produce valuable code that empowers the users and is ready for publishing or production.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to successfully design add-ons that integrate seamlessly with the software and its ecosystem.

Apache OfBiz Cookbook. Over 60 simple but incredibly effective recipes for taking control of OFBiz

Ruth Hoffman, Brian Fitzpatrick

Apache Open For Business (OFBiz) is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that provides a common data model and an extensive set of business processes. But without proper guidance on developing performance-critical applications, it is easy to make the wrong design and technology decisions. The power and promise of Apache OFBiz is comprehensively revealed in a collection of self-contained, quick, practical recipes in this Cookbook.This book covers a range of topics from initial system setup to web application and HTML page creation, Java development, and data maintenance tasks. Focusing on a series of the most commonly performed OFBiz tasks, it provides clear, cogent, and easy-to-follow instructions designed to make the most of your OFBiz experience.Let this book be your guide to enhancing your OFBiz productivity by saving you valuable time. Written specifically to give clear and straightforward answers to the most commonly asked OFBiz questions, this compendium of OFBiz recipes will show you everything you need to know to get things done in OFBiz.Whether you are new to OFBiz or an old pro, you are sure to find many useful hints and handy tips here. Topics range from getting started to configuration and system setup, security and database management through the final stages of developing and testing new OFBiz applications.

The Insider's Guide to Arm Cortex-M Development. Leverage embedded software development tools and examples to become an efficient Cortex-M developer

Zachary Lasiuk, Pareena Verma, Jason Andrews

Cortex-M has been around since 2004, so why a new book now? With new microcontrollers based on the Cortex-M55 and Cortex-M85 being introduced this year, Cortex-M continues to expand. New software concepts, such as standardized software reuse, have emerged alongside new topics including security and machine learning. Development methodologies have also significantly advanced, with more embedded development taking place in the cloud and increased levels of automation. Due to these advances, a single engineer can no longer understand an entire project and requires new skills to be successful.This book provides a unique view of how to navigate and apply the latest concepts in microcontroller development. The book is split into two parts. First, you’ll be guided through how to select the ideal set of hardware, software, and tools for your specific project. Next, you’ll explore how to implement essential topics for modern embedded developers. Throughout the book, there are examples for you to learn by working with real Cortex-M devices with all software available on GitHub. You will gain experience with the small Cortex-M0+, the powerful Cortex-M55, and more Cortex-M processors.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to practically apply modern Cortex-M software development concepts.

iOS and OS X Network Programming Cookbook. If you want to develop network applications for iOS and OS X, this is one of the few books written specifically for those systems. With over 50 recipes and in-depth explanations, it’s an essential guide

Jon Hoffman