Practical Game AI Programming. Unleash the power of Artificial Intelligence to your game

Micael DaGraça

The book starts with the basics examples of AI for different game genres and directly jumps into defining the probabilities and possibilities of the AI character to determine character movement. Next, you’ll learn how AI characters should behave within the environment created.Moving on, you’ll explore how to work with animations. You’ll also plan and create pruning strategies, and create Theta algorithms to find short and realistic looking game paths. Next, you’ll learn how the AI should behave when there is a lot of characters in the same scene.You'll explore which methods and algorithms, such as possibility maps, Forward Chaining Plan, Rete Algorithm, Pruning Strategies, Wall Distances, and Map Preprocess Implementation should be used on different occasions. You’ll discover how to overcome some limitations, and how to deliver a better experience to the player. By the end of the book, you think differently about AI.

Effective Business Intelligence with QuickSight. Boost your business IQ with Amazon QuickSight

Rajesh Nadipalli

Amazon QuickSight is the next-generation Business Intelligence (BI) cloud service that can help you build interactive visualizations on top of various data sources hosted on Amazon Cloud Infrastructure. QuickSight delivers responsive insights into big data and enables organizations to quickly democratize data visualizations and scale to hundreds of users at a fraction of the cost when compared to traditional BI tools.This book begins with an introduction to Amazon QuickSight, feature differentiators from traditional BI tools, and how it fits in the overall AWS big data ecosystem. With practical examples, you will find tips and techniques to load your data to AWS, prepare it, and finally visualize it using QuickSight. You will learn how to build interactive charts, reports, dashboards, and stories using QuickSight and share with others using just your browser and mobile app.The book also provides a blueprint to build a real-life big data project on top of AWS Data Lake Solution and demonstrates how to build a modern data lake on the cloud with governance, data catalog, and analysis. It reviews the current product shortcomings, features in the roadmap, and how to provide feedback to AWS.Grow your profits, improve your products, and beat your competitors.

C# Data Structures and Algorithms. Explore the possibilities of C# for developing a variety of efficient applications

Marcin Jamro

Data structures allow organizing data efficiently. They are critical to various problems and their suitable implementation can provide a complete solution that acts like reusable code. In this book, you will learn how to use various data structures while developing in the C# language as well as how to implement some of the most common algorithms used with such data structures.At the beginning, you will get to know arrays, lists, dictionaries, and sets together with real-world examples of your application. Then, you will learn how to create and use stacks and queues. In the following part of the book, the more complex data structures will be introduced, namely trees and graphs, together with some algorithms for searching the shortest path in a graph. We will also discuss how to organize the code in a manageable, consistent, and extendable way. By the end of the book,you will learn how to build components that are easy to understand, debug, and use in different applications.

CompTIA Project+ Certification Guide. Learn project management best practices and successfully pass the CompTIA Project+ PK0-004 exam

J. Ashley Hunt

The CompTIA Project+ exam is designed for IT professionals who want to improve their career trajectory by gaining certification in project management specific to their industry. This guide covers everything necessary to pass the current iteration of the Project+ PK0-004 exam.The CompTIA Project+ Certification Guide starts by covering project initiation best practices, including an understanding of organizational structures, team roles, and responsibilities. You’ll then study best practices for developing a project charter and the scope of work to produce deliverables necessary to obtain formal approval of the end result. The ability to monitor your project work and make changes as necessary to bring performance back in line with the plan is the difference between a successful and unsuccessful project. The concluding chapters of the book provide best practices to help keep an eye on your projects and close them out successfully. The guide also includes practice questions created to mirror the exam experience and help solidify your understanding of core project management concepts.By the end of this book, you will be able to develop creative solutions for complex issues faced in project management.

Hands-On Red Team Tactics. A practical guide to mastering Red Team operations

Himanshu Sharma, Harpreet Singh

Red Teaming is used to enhance security by performing simulated attacks on an organization in order to detect network and system vulnerabilities. Hands-On Red Team Tactics starts with an overview of pentesting and Red Teaming, before giving you an introduction to few of the latest pentesting tools. We will then move on to exploring Metasploit and getting to grips with Armitage. Once you have studied the fundamentals, you will learn how to use Cobalt Strike and how to set up its team server.The book introduces some common lesser known techniques for pivoting and how to pivot over SSH, before using Cobalt Strike to pivot. This comprehensive guide demonstrates advanced methods of post-exploitation using Cobalt Strike and introduces you to Command and Control (C2) servers and redirectors. All this will help you achieve persistence using beacons and data exfiltration, and will also give you the chance to run through the methodology to use Red Team activity tools such as Empire during a Red Team activity on Active Directory and Domain Controller.In addition to this, you will explore maintaining persistent access, staying untraceable, and getting reverse connections over different C2 covert channels.By the end of this book, you will have learned about advanced penetration testing tools, techniques to get reverse shells over encrypted channels, and processes for post-exploitation.

Mastering Microservices with Java 9. Build domain-driven microservice-based applications with Spring, Spring Cloud, and Angular - Second Edition

Sourabh Sharma

Microservices are the next big thing in designing scalable, easy-to-maintain applications. They not only make app development easier, but also offer great flexibility to utilize various resources optimally. If you want to build an enterprise-ready implementation of the microservices architecture, then this is the book for you! Starting off by understanding the core concepts and framework, you will then focus on the high-level design of large software projects. You will gradually move on to setting up the development environment and configuring it before implementing continuous integration to deploy your microservice architecture. Using Spring security, you will secure microservices and test them effectively using REST Java clients and other tools like RxJava 2.0. We'll show you the best patterns, practices and common principles of microservice design and you'll learn to troubleshoot and debug the issues faced during development. We'll show you how to design and implement reactive microservices. Finally, we’ll show you how to migrate a monolithic application to microservices based application.By the end of the book, you will know how to build smaller, lighter, and faster services that can be implemented easily in a production environment.

Practical Data Wrangling. Expert techniques for transforming your raw data into a valuable source for analytics

Allan Visochek

Around 80% of time in data analysis is spent on cleaning and preparing data for analysis. This is, however, an important task, and is a prerequisite to the rest of the data analysis workflow, including visualization, analysis and reporting. Python and R are considered a popular choice of tool for data analysis, and have packages that can be best used to manipulate different kinds of data, as per your requirements. This book will show you the different data wrangling techniques, and how you can leverage the power of Python and R packages to implement them.You’ll start by understanding the data wrangling process and get a solid foundation to work with different types of data. You’ll work with different data structures and acquire and parse data from various locations. You’ll also see how to reshape the layout of data and manipulate, summarize, and join data sets. Finally, we conclude with a quick primer on accessing and processing data from databases, conducting data exploration, and storing and retrieving data quickly using databases.The book includes practical examples on each of these points using simple and real-world data sets to give you an easier understanding. By the end of the book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of all the data wrangling concepts and how to implement them in the best possible way.

Learn Blockchain Programming with JavaScript. Build your very own Blockchain and decentralized network with JavaScript and Node.js

Eric Traub

Learn Blockchain Programming with JavaScript begins by giving you a clear understanding of what blockchain technology is. You’ll then set up an environment to build your very own blockchain and you’ll add various functionalities to it. By adding functionalities to your blockchain such as the ability to mine new blocks, create transactions, and secure your blockchain through a proof-of-work you’ll gain an in-depth understanding of how blockchain technology functions.As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll learn how to build an API server to interact with your blockchain and how to host your blockchain on a decentralized network. You’ll also build a consensus algorithm and use it to verify data and keep the entire blockchain network synchronized. In the concluding chapters, you’ll finish building your blockchain prototype and gain a thorough understanding of why blockchain technology is so secure and valuable. By the end of this book, you'll understand how decentralized blockchain networks function and why decentralization is such an important feature for securing a blockchain.

Learn Scala Programming. A comprehensive guide covering functional and reactive programming with Scala 2.13, Akka, and Lagom

Slava Schmidt

The second version of Scala has undergone multiple changes to support features and library implementations. Scala 2.13, with its main focus on modularizing the standard library and simplifying collections, brings with it a host of updates.Learn Scala Programming addresses both technical and architectural changes to the redesigned standard library and collections, along with covering in-depth type systems and first-level support for functions. You will discover how to leverage implicits as a primary mechanism for building type classes and look at different ways to test Scala code. You will also learn about abstract building blocks used in functional programming, giving you sufficient understanding to pick and use any existing functional programming library out there. In the concluding chapters, you will explore reactive programming by covering the Akka framework and reactive streams. By the end of this book, you will have built microservices and learned to implement them with the Scala and Lagom framework.

Hybrid Mobile Development with Ionic. Building highly interactive mobile apps

Gaurav Saini

Ionic is an open source, front-end framework that allows you to develop hybrid mobile apps without any native-language hassle for each platform. It offers a library of mobile-optimized HTML, CSS, and JS components for building highly interactive mobile apps.This book will help you to develop a complete, professional and quality mobile application with Ionic Framework. You will start the journey by learning to configure, customize, and migrate Ionic 1x to 3x. Then, you will move on to Ionic 3 components and see how you can customize them according to your applications. You will also implement various native plugins and integrate them with Ionic and Ionic Cloud services to use them optimally in your application. By this time, you will be able to create a full-fledged e-commerce application. Next, you will master authorization, authentication, and security techniques in Ionic 3 to ensure that your application and data are secure. Further, you will integrate the backend services such as Firebase and the Cordova iBeacon plugin in your application. Lastly, you will be looking into Progressive Web Applications and its support with Ionic, with a demonstration of an offline-first application.By the end of the book, you will not only have built a professional, hybrid mobile application, but will also have ensured that your app is secure and performance driven.

Introduction to JVM Languages. Get familiar with the world of Java, Scala, Clojure, Kotlin, and Groovy

Vincent van der Leun

Anyone who knows software development knows about the Java Virtual Machine. The Java Virtual Machine is responsible for interpreting Java byte code and translating it into actions. In the beginning, Java was the only programming language used for the JVM. But increasing complexity of the language and the remarkable performance of the JVM created an opening for a new generation of programming languages. If you want to build a strong foundation with the Java Virtual Machine and get started with popular modern programming languages, then this book is for you.The book will begin with a general introduction of the JVM and its features, which are common to the JVM languages, helping you get abreast with its concepts. It will then dive into explaining languages such as Java, Scala, Clojure, Kotlin, and Groovy and will show how to work with each language, their features, use cases, and pros and cons. By writing example projects in those languages and focusing on each language’s strong points, it will help you find the programming language that is most appropriate for your particular needs. By the end of the book, you will have written multiple programs that run on the Java Virtual Machine and know about the differences between the various languages.

Apache Spark 2.x for Java Developers. Explore big data at scale using Apache Spark 2.x Java APIs

Sourav Gulati, Sumit Kumar

Apache Spark is the buzzword in the big data industry right now, especially with the increasing need for real-time streaming and data processing. While Spark is built on Scala, the Spark Java API exposes all the Spark features available in the Scala version for Java developers. This book will show you how you can implement various functionalities of the Apache Spark framework in Java, without stepping out of your comfort zone.The book starts with an introduction to the Apache Spark 2.x ecosystem, followed by explaining how to install and configure Spark, and refreshes the Java concepts that will be useful to you when consuming Apache Spark's APIs. You will explore RDD and its associated common Action and Transformation Java APIs, set up a production-like clustered environment, and work with Spark SQL. Moving on, you will perform near-real-time processing with Spark streaming, Machine Learning analytics with Spark MLlib, and graph processing with GraphX, all using various Java packages.By the end of the book, you will have a solid foundation in implementing components in the Spark framework in Java to build fast, real-time applications.

Data Lake for Enterprises. Lambda Architecture for building enterprise data systems

Vivek Mishra, Tomcy John, Pankaj Misra

The term Data Lake has recently emerged as a prominent term in the big data industry. Data scientists can make use of it in deriving meaningful insights that can be used by businesses to redefine or transform the way they operate. Lambda architecture is also emerging as one of the very eminent patterns in the big data landscape, as it not only helps to derive useful information from historical data but also correlates real-time data to enable business to take critical decisions. This book tries to bring these two important aspects — data lake and lambda architecture—together.This book is divided into three main sections. The first introduces you to the concept of data lakes, the importance of data lakes in enterprises, and getting you up-to-speed with the Lambda architecture. The second section delves into the principal components of building a data lake using the Lambda architecture. It introduces you to popular big data technologies such as Apache Hadoop, Spark, Sqoop, Flume, and ElasticSearch. The third section is a highly practical demonstration of putting it all together, and shows you how an enterprise data lake can be implemented, along with several real-world use-cases. It also shows you how other peripheral components can be added to the lake to make it more efficient.By the end of this book, you will be able to choose the right big data technologies using the lambda architectural patterns to build your enterprise data lake.

Expert Android Programming. Master skills to build enterprise grade Android applications

Prajyot Mainkar

Android O brings a number of important changes for the users as well as the developers. If you want to create smart android applications which are fast, lightweight and also highly efficient then this is the book that will solve all your problems. You will create a complex enterprise grade app in this book. You will get a quick refresher of the latest android SDK and how to configure your development environment. Then you will move onto creating app layouts, component and module building, creating smart and efficient UIs. The most important part of a modern day app is how real time they are. With this book, you will create a smooth back-end for your app, ensure dynamic and real time communication between different app layers. As we move on, you will learn to leverage the different Android APIs and create an efficient SQLite data layer for your apps. You will implement effective testing techniques to make your app reliable and robust and finally you will learn to deploy it efficiently. The multiple stages of android development will also be simplified by giving you an industry standard set of best practices.

Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations Development Cookbook. Recipes to explore forms, look-ups and different integrations like Power BI and MS Office for your business solutions - Fourth Edition

Abhimanyu Singh, Deepak Agarwal

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations has a lot to offer developers. It allows them to customize and tailor their implementations to meet their organization’s needs. This Development Cookbook will help you manage your company or customer ERP information and operations efficiently. We start off by exploring the concept of data manipulation in Dynamics 365 for Operations. This will also help you build scripts to assist data migration, and show you how to organize data in forms. You will learn how to create custom lookups using Application Object Tree forms and generate them dynamically. We will also show you how you can enhance your application by using advanced form controls, and integrate your system with other external systems. We will help you script and enhance your user interface using UI elements. This book will help you look at application development from a business process perspective, and develop enhanced ERP solutions by learning and implementing the best practices and techniques.

Working with Odoo 10. One stop guide for your enterprise needs - Second Edition

Greg Moss

Para 1: Take full advantage of the benefits of the Odoo module ecosystem whilst learning how to modernise your business with Working with Odoo 10. Covering everything from Odoo development essentials through to CRM and analytic accounting, this guide is a must-have for Odoo beginners. Para 2: A powerful set of open source enterprise management applications, Odoo 10 gives you access to a website builder, integrated e-commerce features, and a fast-growing community to allow you to transform your business. Para 3: With this Odoo book you?ll learn how to set up Odoo online, configure basic company settings, and then explore CRM in Odoo. You?ll cover all the Odoo development essentials and much more, including purchasing application, ERP systems, analytic accounting, and other recent Odoo features. Para 4: What?s Inside ? Understand Odoo installation & the basics of implementing Odoo in your business ? Explore accounting & finance setup and modules to help business efficiency ? Build a website with Odoo ? Customise and configure Odoo to an advanced level

Mastering Adobe Captivate 2019. Build cutting edge professional SCORM compliant and interactive eLearning content with Adobe Captivate - Fifth Edition

Dr. Pooja Jaisingh, Damien Bruyndonckx

Adobe Captivate is used to create highly engaging, interactive, and responsive eLearning content. This book takes you through the production of a few pieces of eLearning content, covering all the project types and workflows of Adobe Captivate. First, you will learn how to create a typical interactive Captivate project. This will give you the opportunity to review all Captivate objects and uncover the application's main tools. Then, you will use the built-in capture engine of Captivate to create an interactive software simulation and a Video Demo that can be published as an MP4 video. Then, you will approach the advanced responsive features of Captivate to create a project that can be viewed on any device. And finally, you will immerse your learners in a 360o environment by creating Virtual Reality projects of Adobe Captivate. At the end of the book, you will empower your workflow and projects with the newer and most advanced features of the application, including variables, advanced actions, JavaScript, and using Captivate 2019 with other applications.If you want to produce high quality eLearning content using a wide variety of techniques, implement eLearning in your company, enable eLearning on any device, assess the effectiveness of the learning by using extensive Quizzing features, or are simply interested in eLearning, this book has you covered!

Learning Microsoft Cognitive Services. Click here to enter text

Leif Larsen

Take your app development to the next level with Learning Microsoft Cognitive Services. Using Leif's knowledge of each of the powerful APIs, you'll learn how to create smarter apps with more human-like capabilities. ? Discover what each API has to offer and learn how to add it to your app ? Study each AI using theory and practical examples ? Learn current API best practices

Practical Internet of Things with JavaScript. Build standalone exciting IoT projects with Raspberry Pi 3 and JavaScript (ES5/ES6)

Arvind Ravulavaru

In this world of technology upgrades, IoT is currently leading with its promise to make the world a more smarter and efficient place.This book will show you how to build simple IoT solutions that will help you to understand how this technology works. We would not only explore the IoT solution stack, but we will also see how to do it with the world’s most misunderstood programming language - JavaScript. Using Raspberry Pi 3 and JavaScript (ES5/ES6) as the base to build all the projects, you will begin with learning about the fundamentals of IoT and then build a standard framework for developing all the applications covered in this book. You will then move on to build a weather station with temperature, humidity and moisture sensors and further integrate Alexa with it. Further, you will build a smart wearable for understanding the concept of fall detection. You will then extend it with the 'If This Then That' (IFTTT) rules engine to send an email on fall detection. Finally, you will be working with the Raspberry Pi 3 camera module and surveillance with a bit of facial detection using Amazon Rekognition platform.At the end of the book, you will not only be able to build standalone exciting IoT applications but also learn how you can extend your projects to another level.

PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook. Mastering query optimization, database monitoring, and performance-tuning for PostgreSQL

Chitij Chauhan, Dinesh Kumar

PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful and easy to use database management systems. It has strong support from the community and is being actively developed with a new release every year. PostgreSQL supports the most advanced features included in SQL standards. It also provides NoSQL capabilities and very rich data types and extensions. All of this makes PostgreSQL a very attractive solution in software systems.If you run a database, you want it to perform well and you want to be able to secure it. As the world’s most advanced open source database, PostgreSQL has unique built-in ways to achieve these goals. This book will show you a multitude of ways to enhance your database’s performance and give you insights into measuring and optimizing a PostgreSQL database to achieve better performance. This book is your one-stop guide to elevate your PostgreSQL knowledge to the next level. First, you’ll get familiarized with essential developer/administrator concepts such as load balancing, connection pooling, and distributing connections to multiple nodes. Next, you will explore memory optimization techniques before exploring the security controls offered by PostgreSQL. Then, you will move on to the essential database/server monitoring and replication strategies with PostgreSQL. Finally, you will learn about query processing algorithms.

Artificial Intelligence for Robotics. Build intelligent robots that perform human tasks using AI techniques

Francis X. Govers

Artificial Intelligence for Robotics starts with an introduction to Robot Operating Systems (ROS), Python, robotic fundamentals, and the software and tools that are required to start out with robotics. You will learn robotics concepts that will be useful for making decisions, along with basic navigation skills.As you make your way through the chapters, you will learn about object recognition and genetic algorithms, which will teach your robot to identify and pick up an irregular object. With plenty of use cases throughout, you will explore natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques to further enhance your robot. In the concluding chapters, you will learn about path planning and goal-oriented programming, which will help your robot prioritize tasks.By the end of this book, you will have learned to give your robot an artificial personality using simulated intelligence.

Vue.js 2 Cookbook. Build modern, interactive web applications with Vue.js

Andrea Passaglia

Vue.js is an open source JavaScript library for building modern, interactive web applications. With a rapidly growing community and a strong ecosystem, Vue.js makes developing complex single page applications a breeze. Its component-based approach, intuitive API, blazing fast core, and compact size make Vue.js a great solution to craft your next front-end application.From basic to advanced recipes, this book arms you with practical solutions to common tasks when building an application using Vue. We start off by exploring the fundamentals of Vue.js: its reactivity system, data-binding syntax, and component-based architecture through practical examples. After that, we delve into integrating Webpack and Babel to enhance your development workflow using single file components. Finally, we take an in-depth look at Vuex for state management and Vue Router to route in your single page applications, and integrate a variety of technologies ranging from Node.js to Electron, and Socket.io to Firebase and HorizonDB.This book will provide you with the best practices as determined by the Vue.js community.

Deep Learning for Computer Vision. Expert techniques to train advanced neural networks using TensorFlow and Keras

Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani

Deep learning has shown its power in several application areas of Artificial Intelligence, especially in Computer Vision. Computer Vision is the science of understanding and manipulating images, and finds enormous applications in the areas of robotics, automation, and so on. This book will also show you, with practical examples, how to develop Computer Vision applications by leveraging the power of deep learning. In this book, you will learn different techniques related to object classification, object detection, image segmentation, captioning, image generation, face analysis, and more. You will also explore their applications using popular Python libraries such as TensorFlow and Keras. This book will help you master state-of-the-art, deep learning algorithms and their implementation.

Git Essentials. Create, merge, and distribute code with Git, the most powerful and flexible versioning system available - Second Edition

Ferdinando Santacroce

Since its inception, Git has attracted skilled developers due to its robust, powerful, and reliable features. Its incredibly fast branching ability transformed a piece of code from a niche tool for Linux Kernel developers into a mainstream distributed versioning system. Like most powerful tools, Git can be hard to approach since it has a lot of commands, subcommands, and options that easily confuse newcomers.The 2nd edition of this very successful book will help you overcome this fear and become adept in all the basic tasks in Git. Building upon the success of the first book, we start with a brief step-by-step installation guide; after this, you'll delve into the essentials of Git. For those of you who have bought the first edition, this time we go into internals in far greater depth, talking less about theory and using much more practical examples.The book serves as a primer for topics to follow, such as branching and merging, creating and managing a GitHub personal repository, and fork and pull requests. You’ll then learn the art of cherry-picking, taking only the commits you want, followed by Git blame. Finally, we'll see how to interoperate with a Subversion server, covering the concepts and commands needed to convert an SVN repository into a Git repository.To conclude, this is a collection of resources, links, and appendices to satisfy even the most curious.