Shading, Lighting, and Rendering with Blender EEVEE. Create amazing concept art 12 times faster using a real-time rendering engine

Sammie Crowder

Blender is the most important up-and-coming 3D software package in the world. EEVEE, a state-of-the-art real-time rendering engine is a fairly new addition to Blender and provides the capacity to create artwork at blazing speed, almost 12 times faster than Cycles.Lighting, Shading, and Rendering with Blender’s EEVEE provides a high-level overview of what EEVEE is capable of, then teaches users about Geometry Nodes, Rendering Techniques, using shortcuts like Kitbashing and Alphas to speed up scene creation, volumetrics, reflections, adding lights, cameras and even special effects like fire and smoke, all in EEVEE. All of this is in the context of creating actual scenes that readers will work through from start to finish. By the time a Blender Artist completes the book, they will have created three separate works that have challenged them to iterate and design with the full power of Blender’s EEVEE.

WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide. Build powerful, interactive plug-ins for your blog and to share online

Vladimir Prelovac, Vladimir Prelovac, Matt Mullenweg

If you can write WordPress plug-ins, you can make WordPress do just about anything. From making the site easier to administer, to adding the odd tweak or new feature, to completely changing the way your blog works, plug-ins are the method WordPress offers to customize and extend its functionality. This book will show you how to build all sorts of WordPress plug-ins: admin plug-ins, Widgets, plug-ins that alter your post output, present custom views of your blog, and more.WordPress Plug-in Development (Beginner's Guide) focuses on teaching you all aspects of modern WordPress development. The book uses real and published WordPress plug-ins and follows their creation from the idea to the finishing touches, in a series of carefully picked, easy-to-follow tutorials. You will discover how to use the WordPress API in all typical situations, from displaying output on the site in the beginning to turning WordPress into a CMS in the last chapter. In Chapters 2 to 7 you will develop six concrete plug-ins and conquer all aspects of WordPress development.Each new chapter and each new plug-in introduces different features of WordPress and how to put them to good use, allowing you to gradually advance your knowledge. This book is written as a guide to take your WordPress skills from the very beginning to the level where you are able to completely understand how WordPress works and how you can use it to your advantage.

Fearless Cross-Platform Development with Delphi. Expand your Delphi skills to build a new generation of Windows, web, mobile, and IoT applications

David Cornelius

Delphi is a strongly typed, event-driven programming language with a rich ecosystem of frameworks and support tools. It comes with an extensive set of web and database libraries for rapid application development on desktop, mobile, and internet-enabled devices. This book will help you keep up with the latest IDE features and provide a sound foundation of project management and recent language enhancements to take your productivity to the next level.You’ll discover how simple it is to support popular mobile device features such as sensors, cameras, and GPS. The book will help you feel comfortable working with FireMonkey and styles and incorporating 3D user interfaces in new ways. As you advance, you’ll be able to build cross-platform solutions that not only look native but also take advantage of a wide array of device capabilities. You’ll also learn how to use embedded databases, such as SQLite and InterBase ToGo, synchronizing them with your own custom backend servers or modules using the powerful RAD Server engine. The book concludes by sharing tips for testing and deploying your end-to-end application suite for a smooth user experience.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to deliver modern enterprise applications using Delphi confidently.

LLVM Essentials. Become familiar with the LLVM infrastructure and start using LLVM libraries to design a compiler

Mayur Pandey, Suyog Sarda, David Farago

LLVM is currently the point of interest for many firms, and has a very active open source community. It provides us with a compiler infrastructure that can be used to write a compiler for a language. It provides us with a set of reusable libraries that can be used to optimize code, and a target-independent code generator to generate code for different backends. It also provides us with a lot of other utility tools that can be easily integrated into compiler projects.This book details how you can use the LLVM compiler infrastructure libraries effectively, and will enable you to design your own custom compiler with LLVM in a snap.We start with the basics, where you’ll get to know all about LLVM. We then cover how you can use LLVM library calls to emit intermediate representation (IR) of simple and complex high-level language paradigms. Moving on, we show you how to implement optimizations at different levels, write an optimization pass, generate code that is independent of a target, and then map the code generated to a backend. The book also walks you through CLANG, IR to IR transformations, advanced IR block transformations, and target machines. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to easily utilize the LLVM libraries in your own projects.

Building Networks and Servers Using BeagleBone. Set up and configure a local area network and file server by building your own home-based multimedia server

Glenn V Veer, William Pretty, Glenn Vander Veer

Learning iOS Penetration Testing. Secure your iOS applications and uncover hidden vulnerabilities by conducting penetration tests

Swaroop Yermalkar

iOS has become one of the most popular mobile operating systems with more than 1.4 million apps available in the iOS App Store. Some security weaknesses in any of these applications or on the system could mean that an attacker can get access to the device and retrieve sensitive information. This book will show you how to conduct a wide range of penetration tests on iOS devices to uncover vulnerabilities and strengthen the system from attacks.Learning iOS Penetration Testing discusses the common vulnerabilities and security-related shortcomings in an iOS application and operating system, and will teach you to conduct static and dynamic analysis of iOS applications.This practical guide will help you uncover vulnerabilities in iOS phones and applications. We begin with basics of iOS security and dig deep to learn about traffic analysis, code analysis, and various other techniques. Later, we discuss the various utilities, and the process of reversing and auditing.

Hands-On AWS Penetration Testing with Kali Linux. Set up a virtual lab and pentest major AWS services, including EC2, S3, Lambda, and CloudFormation

Karl Gilbert, Benjamin Caudill

The cloud is taking over the IT industry. Any organization housing a large amount of data or a large infrastructure has started moving cloud-ward — and AWS rules the roost when it comes to cloud service providers, with its closest competitor having less than half of its market share. This highlights the importance of security on the cloud, especially on AWS. While a lot has been said (and written) about how cloud environments can be secured, performing external security assessments in the form of pentests on AWS is still seen as a dark art. This book aims to help pentesters as well as seasoned system administrators with a hands-on approach to pentesting the various cloud services provided by Amazon through AWS using Kali Linux. To make things easier for novice pentesters, the book focuses on building a practice lab and refining penetration testing with Kali Linux on the cloud. This is helpful not only for beginners but also for pentesters who want to set up a pentesting environment in their private cloud, using Kali Linux to perform a white-box assessment of their own cloud resources. Besides this, the book covers a large variety of AWS services that are often overlooked during a pentest — from serverless infrastructure to automated deployment pipelines. By the end of this book, you will be able to identify possible vulnerable areas efficiently and secure your AWS cloud environment.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Cookbook. Click here to enter text

William Leemans

Dominating the server market, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system gives you the support you need to modernize your infrastructure and boost your organization’s efficiency. Combining both stability and flexibility, RHEL helps you meet the challenges of today and adapt to the demands of tomorrow.This practical Cookbook guide will help you get to grips with RHEL 7 Server and automating its installation. Designed to provide targeted assistance through hands-on recipe guidance, it will introduce you to everything you need to know about KVM guests and deploying multiple standardized RHEL systems effortlessly. Get practical reference advice that will make complex networks setups look like child’s play, and dive into in-depth coverage of configuring a RHEL system. Also including full recipe coverage of how to set up, configuring, and troubleshoot SELinux, you’ll also discover how secure your operating system, as well as how to monitor it.

FinOps Handbook for Microsoft Azure. Empowering teams to optimize their Azure cloud spend with FinOps best practices

Maulik Soni

To gain a competitive edge in today's unpredictable economic climate, you’ll need to unravel the mystery of saving costs on Microsoft Azure Cloud. This book helps you do just that with proven strategies for building, running, and sustaining repeated cost optimization initiatives across your organization. You’ll learn how to collaborate with finance, procurement, product, and engineering teams to optimize your cloud spend and achieve cost savings that can make a significant impact on your bottom line.The book begins by showing you how to effectively monitor and manage your cloud usage, identify cost-saving opportunities, and implement changes that’ll reduce your overall spend. Whether you're a small start-up or a large enterprise, this book will equip you with the knowledge and skills needed to achieve cost savings and maintain a lean cloud infrastructure. As you advance, you'll find out how to benchmark your current cloud spend and establish a budget for cloud usage. Throughout the chapters, you’ll learn how to negotiate with your cloud provider to optimize your rate, allocate cost for the container, and gain a solid understanding of metric-driven cost optimization.By the end of this FinOps book, you’ll have become proficient in Azure Cloud financial management with the help of real-world examples, use cases, and scenarios.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Dashboards Cookbook. Figuring out Dashboards in Microsoft Dynamic CRM doesn’t have to be complicated. The smart way to learn is by following these 50+ recipes that help you visualize your CRM data clearly and communicatively

Mark AuCoin, Mark AuCoin

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 offers you access to exciting new interactive and flexible Dashboards that contain any combination of Charts, Lists, iFrames and Silverlight components. These can be used to easily visualize your CRM data and provide you with a light BI interface, all of which this practical cookbook will enable you to utilize.At first glance, Dashboards and their myriad information can be overwhelming to users that are new to the Dynamics CRM 2011 interface. This book guides you through navigating and interacting with Dashboards in a simple and easy to follow manner, and builds on that experience to walk you through creating and sharing your own User Dashboards.Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Dashboards Cookbookù offers a range of practical recipes for mastering dashboard navigation, interaction, and building custom Dashboards in Dynamics CRM.You will immediately get to grips with essential tasks like changing Dashboard settings and sharing Dashboards with other members in the CRM team, as well as adding custom components like iFrames and Lists. Along the way you will also follow the creation of a simple HTML WebResouce that can be added to your Dashboard.By the end of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Dashboards Cookbookù, you will be fully equipped to take advantage of the exciting new Dashboards features of Dynamics CRM 2011.

Raspberry Pi Robotic Blueprints. Utilize the powerful ingredients of Raspberry Pi to bring to life your amazing robots that can act, draw, and have fun with laser tags

Wolfram Donat, Richard Grimmett

The Raspberry Pi is a series of credit card-sized single-board computers developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of promoting the teaching of basic computer science in schools. The Raspberry Pi is known as a tiny computer built on a single circuit board. It runs a Linux operating system, and has connection ports for various peripherals so that it can be hooked up to sensors, motors, cameras, and more. Raspberry Pi has been hugely popular among hardware hobbyists for various projects, including robotics. This book gives you an insight into implementing several creative projects using the peripherals provided by Raspberry Pi. To start, we’ll walk through the basic robotics concepts that the world of Raspberry Pi offers us, implementing wireless communication to control your robot from a distance. Next, we demonstrate how to build a sensible and a visionary robot, maximizing the use of sensors and step controllers. After that, we focus on building a wheeled robot that can draw and play hockey. To finish with a bang, we’ll build an autonomous hexcopter, that is, a flying robot controlled by Raspberry Pi.By the end of this book, you will be a maestro in applying an array of different technologies to create almost any imaginable robot.

Hands-On Unity Game Development. Unlock the power of Unity 2023 and build your dream game - Fourth Edition

Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo, Juan Gabriel Gomila Salas

Take your game development skills to the next level. Dive into the world of game creation confidently by elevating your game development skills. This book is your definitive and practical guide to unlocking the full potential of Unity 2023. Every chapter is designed to empower you to customize your own game, not just replicate what's in the book. This new edition includes immersive Augmented Reality (AR) experiences and performance optimization with Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS).From Scene Creation to seamless Assert Integration, dive into C# programming and Visual Scripting with step-by-step guidance for beginners. Implement dynamic gameplay elements, including movement, spawning, physics, and health systems. Delve deeper into the magic of Game AI through sensor-driven decision-making with Finite State Machines (FSMs). Elevate your visuals with materials, shaders, textures, and particle systems. Optimize performance with Profiler insights and debug your game for a polished final product. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned pro, this book will equip you with the skills needed to bring your game ideas to life.

OpenStack Cloud Security. Your OpenStack cloud storage contains all your vital computing resources and potentially sensitive data – secure it with this essential OpenStack tutorial

Fabio Alessandro Locati, Fabio A Locati (Duplicate)

Designing and Prototyping Interfaces with Figma. Learn essential UX/UI design principles by creating interactive prototypes for mobile, tablet, and desktop

Fabio Staiano

A driving force of the design tools market, Figma makes it easy to work with classic design features while enabling unique innovations and opening up real-time collaboration possibilities. It comes as no surprise that many designers decide to switch from other tools to Figma.In this book, you'll be challenged to design a user interface for a responsive mobile application having researched and understood user needs. You'll become well-versed with the process in a step-by-step manner by exploring the theory first and gradually moving on to practice. You'll begin your learning journey by covering the basics of user experience research with FigJam and the process of creating a complete design using Figma tools such as Components, Variants, Auto Layout, and much more. You'll also learn how to prototype your design and explore the potential of community resources such as templates and plugins.By the end of this Figma book, you'll have a solid understanding of the user interface workflow, managing essential Figma tools, and organizing your workflow.

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook. Master the art of Shader programming to bring life to your Unity projects

Alan Zucconi

Since their introduction to Unity, Shaders have been notoriously difficult to understand and implement in games: complex mathematics have always stood in the way of creating your own Shaders and attaining that level of realism you crave. With Shaders, you can transform your game into a highly polished, refined product with Unity’s post-processing effects.Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook is the first of its kind to bring you the secrets of creating Shaders for Unity3D—guiding you through the process of understanding vectors, how lighting is constructed with them, and also how textures are used to create complex effects without the heavy math.We’ll start with essential lighting and finishing up by creating stunning screen Effects just like those in high quality 3D and mobile games. You’ll discover techniques including normal mapping, image-based lighting, and how to animate your models inside a Shader. We’ll explore the secrets behind some of the most powerful techniques, such as physically based rendering! With Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook, what seems like a dark art today will be second nature by tomorrow.

Blender 3D Incredible Machines. Design, model, and texture complex mechanical objects in Blender

Christopher Kuhn, Allan Brito

Blender 3D is one of the top pieces of 3D animation software. Machine modeling is an essential aspect of war games, space games, racing games, and animated action films. As the Blender software grows more powerful and popular, there is a demand to take your modeling skills to the next level. This book will cover all the topics you need to create professional models and renders. This book will help you develop a comprehensive skill set that covers the key aspects of mechanical modeling. Through this book, you will create many types of projects, including a pistol, spacecraft, robot, and a racer. We start by making a Sci-fi pistol, creating its basic shape and adding details to it. Moving on, you’ll discover modeling techniques for larger objects such as a space craft and take a look at how different techniques are required for freestyle modeling. After this, we’ll create the basic shapes for the robot and combine the meshes to create unified objects. We'll assign materials and explore the various options for freestyle rendering. We’ll discuss techniques to build low-poly models, create a low-poly racer, and explain how they differ from the high poly models we created previously. By the end of this book, you will have mastered a workflow that you will be able to apply to your own creations.

Engineering Data Mesh in Azure Cloud. Implement data mesh using Microsoft Azure's Cloud Adoption Framework

Aniruddha Deswandikar

Decentralizing data and centralizing governance are practical, scalable, and modern approaches to data analytics. However, implementing a data mesh can feel like changing the engine of a moving car. Most organizations struggle to start and get caught up in the concept of data domains, spending months trying to organize domains. This is where Engineering Data Mesh in Azure Cloud can help.The book starts by assessing your existing framework before helping you architect a practical design. As you progress, you’ll focus on the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure and the cloud-scale analytics framework, which will help you quickly set up a landing zone for your data mesh in the cloud.The book also resolves common challenges related to the adoption and implementation of a data mesh faced by real customers. It touches on the concepts of data contracts and helps you build practical data contracts that work for your organization. The last part of the book covers some common architecture patterns used for modern analytics frameworks such as artificial intelligence (AI).By the end of this book, you’ll be able to transform existing analytics frameworks into a streamlined data mesh using Microsoft Azure, thereby navigating challenges and implementing advanced architecture patterns for modern analytics workloads.

Puppet Cookbook. Jump-start your Puppet deployment using engaging and practical recipes

John Arundel, Thomas Uphill

Mastering Customer Success. Discover tactics to decrease churn and expand revenue

Jeff Mar, Peter Armaly, Mark Stouse

The rapidly evolving customer success landscape has left many Customer Success Managers (CSMs) struggling to keep pace with the complexities of this dynamic role. This Customer Success book bridges the gap by providing a comprehensive framework for mastering the essential skills required to excel.You’ll find out why the Customer Success function is indispensable today and gain expert insights into account segmentation, financial tiering, ideal customer profiles, and the complexity of customer engagement process design. You’ll then delve into playbook development, where you’ll find practical guidance for CSMs and Customer Success Operations Managers who want to improve their ability to drive desired business outcomes. Through insightful case studies, the authors illustrate their own experience of successful Customer Success implementation, showing you what it takes to exceed customer expectations with well-designed, proactive services. The journey doesn’t end there—it extends to highlighting the resilience required to build and operate successful Customer Success organizations.By the end of this guide, you’ll be equipped with the tactics and mindset necessary to stand out as a world-class Customer Success leader in your organization, driving growth at every turn.

Pragmatic Microservices with C# and Azure. Build, deploy, and scale microservices efficiently to meet modern software demands

Christian Nagel

Pragmatic Microservices with C# and Azure introduces .NET Aspire for microservices, focusing on defining an app model, utilizing service discovery, and integrating with Azure's native cloud services. Written by a Microsoft MVP and seasoned software architect with over two decades of experience in .NET, this book will help you get to grips with robust service development using .NET features like minimal APIs, gRPC, and SignalR for real-time communication. Aside from covering essential aspects of DevOps, including testing methodologies such as unit, integration, and load testing, you’ll also explore logging and monitoring including OpenTelemetry using tools like Azure Log Analytics, Application Insights, Prometheus, and Grafana. You'll learn about asynchronous communication leveraging queues and events through Azure Event Hub and Apache. Throughout the book, theoretical aspects will be complemented by practical skills gained from building and deploying a fully functional microservices-based application. By the end, you’ll possess a deep understanding of microservices architecture, hands-on experience with various .NET technologies and Azure services, and the ability to design, build, deploy, and manage microservices applications effectively in both on-premises and cloud environments.

40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know. Hone your problem-solving skills by learning different algorithms and their implementation in Python

Imran Ahmad

Algorithms have always played an important role in both the science and practice of computing. Beyond traditional computing, the ability to use algorithms to solve real-world problems is an important skill that any developer or programmer must have. This book will help you not only to develop the skills to select and use an algorithm to solve real-world problems but also to understand how it works.You’ll start with an introduction to algorithms and discover various algorithm design techniques, before exploring how to implement different types of algorithms, such as searching and sorting, with the help of practical examples. As you advance to a more complex set of algorithms, you'll learn about linear programming, page ranking, and graphs, and even work with machine learning algorithms, understanding the math and logic behind them. Further on, case studies such as weather prediction, tweet clustering, and movie recommendation engines will show you how to apply these algorithms optimally. Finally, you’ll become well versed in techniques that enable parallel processing, giving you the ability to use these algorithms for compute-intensive tasks.By the end of this book, you'll have become adept at solving real-world computational problems by using a wide range of algorithms.

The Road to Azure Cost Governance. Techniques to tame your monthly Azure bill with a continuous optimization journey for your apps

Paola E. Annis, Giuliano Caglio, Marco Barra Caracciolo

Cloud teams and ICT cost controllers working with Azure will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide, introducing a process model for structured cost governance. The Road to Azure Cost Governance is a must-read if you find yourself facing the harsh reality of monthly cloud costs gradually getting out of control.Starting with how resources are created and managed, everything you need to know in order to track, display, optimize, rightsize, and clean up cloud resources will be tackled with a workflow approach that will leave the choice of operation to you (be it the Azure CLI, automation, logic apps, or even custom code). Using real-world datasets, you'll learn everything from basic cost management to modeling your cloud spend across your technical resources in a sustainable way. The book will also show you how to create a recursive optimization process that will give you full control of spending and savings, while helping you reserve budget for future cloud projects and innovation.By the end of this Azure book, you'll have a clear understanding and control of your cloud spend along with knowledge of a number of cost-saving techniques used by companies around the world, application optimization patterns, and the carbon impact of your cloud infrastructure.

Technology Operating Models for Cloud and Edge. Create your purpose-built distributed operating model for public, hybrid, multicloud, and edge

Ahilan Ponnusamy, Andreas Spanner, Mirco Hering, Vincent Caldeira, ...

Cloud goals, such as faster time to market, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), capex reduction, self-service enablement, and complexity reduction are important, but organizations often struggle to achieve the desired outcomes. With edge computing gaining momentum across industries and making it possible to move workloads seamlessly between cloud and edge locations, organizations need working recipes to find ways of extracting the most value out of their cloud and edge estate.This book provides a practical way to build a strategy-aligned operating model while considering various related factors such as culture, leadership, team structures, metrics, intrinsic motivators, team incentives, tenant experience, platform engineering, operations, open source, and technology choices. Throughout the chapters, you’ll discover how single, hybrid, or multicloud architectures, security models, automation, application development, workload deployments, and application modernization can be reutilized for edge workloads to help you build a secure yet flexible technology operating model. The book also includes a case study which will walk you through the operating model build process in a step-by-step way.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build your own fit-for-purpose distributed technology operating model for your organization in an open culture way.

WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook. Explore the complete set of tools to craft powerful plugins that extend the world’s most popular CMS - Third Edition

Yannick Lefebvre

WordPress is one of the most widely used, powerful, and open content management systems (CMSs). Whether you're a site owner trying to find the right extension, a developer who wants to contribute to the community, or a website developer working to fulfill a client's needs, learning how to extend WordPress' capabilities will help you to unleash its full potential. This book will help you become familiar with API functions to create secure plugins with easy-to-use administration interfaces.This third edition contains new recipes and up-to-date code samples, including new chapters on creating custom blocks for the block editor and integrating data from external sources. From one chapter to the next, you’ll learn how to create plugins of varying complexity, ranging from a few lines of code to complex extensions that provide intricate new capabilities. You'll start by using the basic mechanisms provided in WordPress to create plugins, followed by recipes covering how to design administration panels, enhance the post editor with custom fields, store custom data, and even create custom blocks. You'll safely incorporate dynamic elements into web pages using scripting languages, learn how to integrate data from external sources, and build new widgets that users will be able to add to WordPress sidebars and widget areas.By the end of this book, you will be able to create WordPress plugins to perform any task you can imagine.