Publisher: Packt Publishing
Founded in 2004 in Birmingham, UK, Packt's mission is to help the world put software to work in new ways, through the delivery of effective learning and information services to IT professionals. Working towards that vision, we have published over 6,500 books and videos so far, providing IT professionals with the actionable knowledge they need to get the job done - whether that's specific learning on an emerging technology or optimizing key skills in more established tools. As part of our mission, we have also awarded over $1,000,000 through our Open Source Project Royalty scheme, helping numerous projects become household names along the way.
3625
Ebook

Draw and Paint Better with Krita. Discover pro-level techniques and practices to create spectacular digital illustrations with Krita

Wesley Gardner

Krita is a free, open-source digital painting program with industry-leading functionality and a creative suite of tools able to bring any visual idea to life. It allows for a fast, clean approach to creating digital art, without the hassle of pay-to-play or subscription license fees, but just like all other art software, it takes time and effort to learn it.This book provides a comprehensive look into functional tools, visual problem-solving, and leading painting techniques using Krita to unleash your inner artist. You’ll learn the functionality and tools of Krita for creating digital and print-quality work as well as explore manipulation toolsets, custom brush creation, overviews of color spaces, and layer management. As you progress, you’ll get to grips with ‘key styles’ needed to make professional-grade digital art, through techniques such as photobashing, 3D paint-overs, and more traditional painting methods, along with covering how Krita handles these workflows. Next, you’ll work through a few step-by-step art pieces using the skills and tools learned throughout the book.By the end of this Krita book, you’ll have a solid understanding of the Krita work environment and be able to bring your artistic visions to life with a myriad of leading industry-standard techniques.

3626
Ebook

vBulletin: A Users Guide. Configure, manage and maintain your own vBulletin discussion forum

Kathy Kingsley-Hughes, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Ashley Busby

Written specifically to allow you to create a discussion forum, vBulletin, provides all of the tools, features and functionality for you to set up and develop a vibrant community. Because it specializes in this one aspect of your website, all the features are geared towards this goal, and you can leave the improvement and additions to the vBulletin developers while you get on with managing the rest of your website. If you are either already running a community forum based on vBulletin, or are planning on establishing one, then this is the book for you. This book will guide you through installing, configuring, managing and maintaining a vBulletin discussion forum on your own website. The book begins with the initial installation and configuration of vBulletin on your system. You will then go on a tour of vBulletin and its features, for both users and administrators. This will grow your understanding and familiarise you with the power and possibilities of vBulletin. vBulletin's Administration Control Panel is where you can control every aspect of your board. From users, forums and word filters to skins, templates and maintenance, everything can be done through the web-based control panel. The book devotes significant sections to covering these, getting you up to speed on the options available to you, and offering advice to help you make the right choices with your board administration. To make your forums stand out from the rest, we cover skins and templates to take your first steps in customising your forum. vBulletin is one of the most popular forum platforms available. Well known for its power and speed, it drives many of the most popular discussion forums on the Internet.

3627
Ebook

The HTML and CSS Workshop. Learn to build your own websites and kickstart your career as a web designer or developer

Lewis Coulson, Brett Jephson, Rob Larsen, Matt Park, ...

With knowledge of CSS and HTML, you can build visually appealing, interactive websites without relying on website-building tools that come with lots of pre-packaged restrictions. The HTML and CSS Workshop takes you on a journey to learning how to create beautiful websites using your own content, understanding how they work, and how to manage them long-term.The book begins by introducing you to HTML5 and CSS3, and takes you through the process of website development with easy-to-follow steps. Exploring how the browser renders websites from code to display, you'll advance to adding a cinematic experience to your website by incorporating video and audio elements into your code. You'll also use JavaScript to add interactivity to your site, integrate HTML forms for capturing user data, incorporate animations to create slick transitions, and build stunning themes using advanced CSS. You'll also get to grips with mobile-first development using responsive design and media queries, to ensure your sites perform well on any device.Throughout the book, you'll work on engaging projects, including a video store home page that you will iteratively add functionality to as you learn new skills.By the end of this Workshop, you'll have gained the confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious web development projects.

3628
Ebook
3629
Ebook

Hands-On Design Patterns with Java. Learn design patterns that enable the building of large-scale software architectures

Dr. Edward Lavieri

Java design patterns are reusable and proven solutions to software design problems. This book covers over 60 battle-tested design patterns used by developers to create functional, reusable, and flexible software. Hands-On Design Patterns with Java starts with an introduction to the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and delves into class and object diagrams with the help of detailed examples. You'll study concepts and approaches to object-oriented programming (OOP) and OOP design patterns to build robust applications. As you advance, you'll explore the categories of GOF design patterns, such as behavioral, creational, and structural, that help you improve code readability and enable large-scale reuse of software. You’ll also discover how to work effectively with microservices and serverless architectures by using cloud design patterns, each of which is thoroughly explained and accompanied by real-world programming solutions. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to speed up your software development process using the right design patterns, and you’ll be comfortable working on scalable and maintainable projects of any size.

3630
Ebook

Procedural Content Generation for C++ Game Development. Get to know techniques and approaches to procedurally generate game content in C++ using Simple and Fast Multimedia Library

Dale Green

Procedural generation is a growing trend in game development. It allows developers to create games that are bigger and more dynamic, giving the games a higher level of replayability. Procedural generation isn’t just one technique, it’s a collection of techniques and approaches that are used together to create dynamic systems and objects. C++ is the industry-standard programming language to write computer games. It’s at the heart of most engines, and is incredibly powerful. SFML is an easy-to-use, cross-platform, and open-source multimedia library. Access to computer hardware is broken into succinct modules, making it a great choice if you want to develop cross-platform games with ease.Using C++ and SFML technologies, this book will guide you through the techniques and approaches used to generate content procedurally within game development. Throughout the course of this book, we’ll look at examples of these technologies, starting with setting up a roguelike project using the C++ template. We’ll then move on to using RNG with C++ data types and randomly scattering objects within a game map. We will create simple console examples to implement in a real game by creating unique and randomised game items, dynamic sprites, and effects, and procedurally generating game events. Then we will walk you through generating random game maps. At the end, we will have a retrospective look at the project. By the end of the book, not only will you have a solid understanding of procedural generation, but you’ll also have a working roguelike game that you will have extended using the examples provided.

3631
Ebook

TensorFlow 2 Reinforcement Learning Cookbook. Over 50 recipes to help you build, train, and deploy learning agents for real-world applications

Palanisamy P

With deep reinforcement learning, you can build intelligent agents, products, and services that can go beyond computer vision or perception to perform actions. TensorFlow 2.x is the latest major release of the most popular deep learning framework used to develop and train deep neural networks (DNNs). This book contains easy-to-follow recipes for leveraging TensorFlow 2.x to develop artificial intelligence applications.Starting with an introduction to the fundamentals of deep reinforcement learning and TensorFlow 2.x, the book covers OpenAI Gym, model-based RL, model-free RL, and how to develop basic agents. You'll discover how to implement advanced deep reinforcement learning algorithms such as actor-critic, deep deterministic policy gradients, deep-Q networks, proximal policy optimization, and deep recurrent Q-networks for training your RL agents. As you advance, you’ll explore the applications of reinforcement learning by building cryptocurrency trading agents, stock/share trading agents, and intelligent agents for automating task completion. Finally, you'll find out how to deploy deep reinforcement learning agents to the cloud and build cross-platform apps using TensorFlow 2.x.By the end of this TensorFlow book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of deep reinforcement learning algorithms and their implementations from scratch.

3632
Ebook
3633
Ebook

Instant IntroJs. Learn how to work with the IntroJs library to create useful, step-by-step help and introductions for websites and applications

Ehsan Arasteh, Afshin Mehrabani

IntroJs is a JavaScript and CSS3 library, used to create simple step-by-step help pages or introductions for websites and applications to show the users new features or whole application parts quickly and concisely. Instant IntroJs is a reference to get started with IntroJs right away.Instant IntroJs teaches you how to work with key IntroJs methods and events to create awesome step-by-step introductions. This book contains numerous examples of introductions and help pages with detailed explanations. It also shows you how to customize the library with your preferred stylesheet or integrate it with other server-side frameworks.Instant IntroJs teaches you how to work with the IntroJs API, methods, and events to create step-by-step introductions for websites and applications.This book will give you the knowledge to make the preferred changes to IntroJs in order to build a customized introduction. Instant IntroJs provides many examples of introductions and helps you with using HTML attributes and JSON configurations, as well as some descriptions about how to use and integrate IntroJs with other server-side libraries, such as Ruby on Rails and PHP Yii. You will be provided with information about the latest features of IntroJs that include multi-page introductions, creating introductions using JSON configuration and HTML attributes, methods to change or customize the library, and more.Instant IntroJs provides full and detailed examples of step-by-step introductions to help you easily learn and use the latest version of the IntroJs library.

3634
Ebook

Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide

Abhijit Jana

Kinect has been a game-changer in the world of motion games and applications since its first release. It has been touted as a controller for Microsoft Xbox but is much more than that. The developer version of Kinect, Kinect for Windows SDK, provides developers with the tools to develop applications that run on Windows. You can use this to develop applications that make interaction with your computer hands-free. This book focuses on developing applications using the Kinect for Windows SDK. It is a complete end to end solution using different features of Kinect for Windows SDK with step by step guidance. The book will also help you develop motion sensitive and speech recognition enabled applications. You will also learn about building application using multiple Kinects.The book begins with explaining the different components of Kinect and then moves into to the setting up the device and getting thedevelopment environment ready. You will be surprised at how quickly the book takes you through the details of Kinect APIs. You will use NUI to use the Kinect for Natural Inputs like skeleton tracking, sensing, speech recognizing. You will capture different types of stream, and images, handle stream event, and capture frame. Kinect device contains a motorized tilt to control sensor angles, you will learn how to adjust it automatically. The last part of the book teaches you how to build application using multiple Kinects and discuss how Kinect can be used to integrate with other devices such as Windows Phone and microcontroller.

3635
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3636
Ebook

Building Cross-Platform GUI Applications with Fyne. Create beautiful, platform-agnostic graphical applications using Fyne and the Go programming language

Andrew Williams

The history of graphical application development is long and complicated, with various development challenges that persist to this day. The mix of technologies involved and the need to use different programming languages led to a very steep learning curve for developers looking to build applications across multiple platforms.In Building Cross-Platform GUI Applications with Fyne, you'll understand how the Go language, when paired with a modern graphical toolkit such as Fyne, can overcome these issues and make application development much easier. To provide an easy-to-use framework for cross-platform app development, the Fyne project offers many graphical concepts and design principles that are outlined throughout this book.By working through five example projects, you'll learn how to build apps effectively, focusing on each of the main areas, including the canvas, layouts, file handling, widgets, data binding, and themes. The book will also show you how the completed applications can then be run on your desktop computer, laptop, and smartphone. After completing these projects, you will discover how to prepare applications for release and distribute them to platform marketplaces and app stores.By the end of this book, you'll be able to create cross-platform graphical applications with visually appealing user interfaces and concise code.

3637
Ebook

Networking Fundamentals. Develop the networking skills required to pass the Microsoft MTA Networking Fundamentals Exam 98-366

Gordon Davies

A network is a collection of computers, servers, mobile devices, or other computing devices connected for sharing data. This book will help you become well versed in basic networking concepts and prepare to pass Microsoft's MTA Networking Fundamentals Exam 98-366.Following Microsoft's official syllabus, the book starts by covering network infrastructures to help you differentiate intranets, internets, and extranets, and learn about network topologies. You’ll then get up to date with common network hardware devices such as routers and switches and the media types used to connect them together. As you advance, the book will take you through different protocols and services and the requirements to follow a standardized approach to networking. You’ll get to grips with the OSI and TCP/IP models as well as IPv4 and IPv6. The book also shows you how to recall IP addresses through name resolution. Finally, you’ll be able to practice everything you’ve learned and take the exam confidently with the help of mock tests. By the end of this networking book, you’ll have developed a strong foundation in the essential networking concepts needed to pass Exam 98-366.

3638
Ebook

Python GUI Programming - A Complete Reference Guide. Develop responsive and powerful GUI applications with PyQt and Tkinter

Alan D. Moore, B. M. Harwani

A responsive graphical user interface (GUI) helps you interact with your application, improves user experience, and enhances the efficiency of your applications. With Python, you’ll have access to elaborate GUI frameworks that you can use to build interactive GUIs that stand apart from the rest.This Learning Path begins by introducing you to Tkinter and PyQt, before guiding you through the application development process. As you expand your GUI by adding more widgets, you'll work with networks, databases, and graphical libraries that enhance its functionality. You'll also learn how to connect to external databases and network resources, test your code, and maximize performance using asynchronous programming. In later chapters, you'll understand how to use the cross-platform features of Tkinter and Qt5 to maintain compatibility across platforms. You’ll be able to mimic the platform-native look and feel, and build executables for deployment across popular computing platforms.By the end of this Learning Path, you'll have the skills and confidence to design and build high-end GUI applications that can solve real-world problems.This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products:Python GUI Programming with Tkinter by Alan D. MooreQt5 Python GUI Programming Cookbook by B. M. Harwani

3639
Ebook

Mastering Python for Networking and Security. Leverage the scripts and libraries of Python version 3.7 and beyond to overcome networking and security issues - Second Edition

José Ortega

It’s now more apparent than ever that security is a critical aspect of IT infrastructure, and that devastating data breaches can occur from simple network line hacks. As shown in this book, combining the latest version of Python with an increased focus on network security can help you to level up your defenses against cyber attacks and cyber threats.Python is being used for increasingly advanced tasks, with the latest update introducing new libraries and packages featured in the Python 3.7.4 recommended version. Moreover, most scripts are compatible with the latest versions of Python and can also be executed in a virtual environment.This book will guide you through using these updated packages to build a secure network with the help of Python scripting. You’ll cover a range of topics, from building a network to the procedures you need to follow to secure it. Starting by exploring different packages and libraries, you’ll learn about various ways to build a network and connect with the Tor network through Python scripting. You will also learn how to assess a network's vulnerabilities using Python security scripting. Later, you’ll learn how to achieve endpoint protection by leveraging Python packages, along with writing forensic scripts.By the end of this Python book, you’ll be able to use Python to build secure apps using cryptography and steganography techniques.

3640
Ebook

Mastering Go. Leverage Go's expertise for advanced utilities, empowering you to develop professional software - Fourth Edition

Mihalis Tsoukalos

Mastering Go, now in its fourth edition, remains the go-to resource for real-world Go development. This comprehensive guide delves into advanced Go concepts, including RESTful servers, and Go memory management. This edition brings new chapters on Go Generics and fuzzy Testing, and an enriched exploration of efficiency and performance. As you work your way through the chapters, you will gain confidence and a deep understanding of advanced Go topics, including concurrency and the operation of the Garbage Collector, using Go with Docker, writing powerful command-line utilities, working with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data, and interacting with databases.You will be engaged in real-world exercises, build network servers, and develop robust command-line utilities. With in-depth chapters on RESTful services, the WebSocket protocol, and Go internals, you are going to master Go's nuances, optimization, and observability. You will also elevate your skills in efficiency, performance, and advanced testing.With the help of Mastering Go, you will become an expert Go programmer by building Go systems and implementing advanced Go techniques in your projects.

3641
Ebook

Python Machine Learning By Example. Build intelligent systems using Python, TensorFlow 2, PyTorch, and scikit-learn - Third Edition

Yuxi (Hayden) Liu

Python Machine Learning By Example, Third Edition serves as a comprehensive gateway into the world of machine learning (ML).With six new chapters, on topics including movie recommendation engine development with Naïve Bayes, recognizing faces with support vector machine, predicting stock prices with artificial neural networks, categorizing images of clothing with convolutional neural networks, predicting with sequences using recurring neural networks, and leveraging reinforcement learning for making decisions, the book has been considerably updated for the latest enterprise requirements.At the same time, this book provides actionable insights on the key fundamentals of ML with Python programming. Hayden applies his expertise to demonstrate implementations of algorithms in Python, both from scratch and with libraries.Each chapter walks through an industry-adopted application. With the help of realistic examples, you will gain an understanding of the mechanics of ML techniques in areas such as exploratory data analysis, feature engineering, classification, regression, clustering, and NLP.By the end of this ML Python book, you will have gained a broad picture of the ML ecosystem and will be well-versed in the best practices of applying ML techniques to solve problems.

3642
Ebook

Scalable Application Development with NestJS. Leverage REST, GraphQL, microservices, testing, and deployment for seamless growth

Pacifique Linjanja

In this book, Pacifique Linjanja, a globally recognized software engineer and open-source contributor, shares his deep technical expertise and practical insights from his extensive experience delivering enterprise-level applications to unpack the full potential of NestJS, the cutting-edge Node.js framework.This book covers the core concepts, design patterns, and best practices for building scalable, high-performance applications with NestJS. You’ll learn REST API and GraphQL implementations, harness the power of microservices, and explore real-world case studies, including e-commerce, social networking, and ERP systems. The chapters provide step-by-step guidance for setting up your development environment with TypeScript and npm, structuring projects effectively, and using the Apollo Federation architecture to create efficient GraphQL APIs. This book offers hands-on guidance for testing and debugging APIs, handling exceptions, and validating data using pipes and guards, all while helping you build a complete NestJS application from scratch.By the end, you'll be ready to apply DevOps principles for continuous integration and deployment, as well as secure your NestJS applications using advanced techniques.

3643
Ebook

Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification Handbook. A handy guide that covers the most essential topics for Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification in an easy-to-understand format

Siddhesh Kabe

The Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam is for individuals who want to demonstrate their skills and knowledge in designing, building, and implementing custom applications using the declarative customization capabilities of Force.com. This book will build a strong foundation in Force.com to prepare you for the platform app builder certification exam. It will guide you through designing the interface while introducing the Lightning Process Builder. Next, we will implement business logic using various point and click features of Force.com. We will learn to manage data and create reports and dashboards. We will then learn to administer the force.com application by configuring the object-level, field-level, and record-level security. By the end of this book, you will be completely equipped to take the Platform App Builder certification exam.

3644
Ebook
3645
Ebook

Mastering FreeSWITCH. Advanced tips and tricks for advanced multimedia communication

Anthony Minessale II, Giovanni Maruzzelli, Russell Treleaven, Seven Du, ...

FreeSWITCH is one of the best tools around if you’re looking for a modern method of managing communication protocols through a range of different media. From real-time browser communication with the WebRTC API to implementing VoIP (voice over internet protocol), with FreeSWITCH you’re in full control of your projects. This book shows you how to unlock its full potential – more than just a tutorial, it’s packed with plenty of tips and tricks to make it work for you.Written by members of the team who actually helped build FreeSWITCH, it will guide you through some of the newest features of version 1.6 including video transcoding and conferencing. Find out how FreeSWITCH interacts with other tools and APIs, learn how to tackle common (and not so common) challenges ranging from high availability to IVR development and programming advanced PBXs. Great communication functionality begins with FreeSWITCH – find out how and get your project up and running today.

3646
Ebook
3647
Ebook

Edge Computing Simplified. Explore all aspects of edge computing for business leaders and technologists

Perry Lea

The migration of computing to the edge is the logical progression of where computing is performed on a global scale. Edge computing is not a new paradigm but a necessary technology to address issues such as latency, service charges, reliability, connectivity, and privacy. This book walks you through the definition and architecture of edge computing systems and why they are critical in today’s ecosystem of IoT devices and an “everything connected” world.You will start your journey with an introduction to different edge computing hardware platforms, which vary by use case. From there, you’ll explore operating systems and middleware packages that manage edge devices such as Azure IoT. Then, you will explore communication systems such as near-range Bluetooth and RFID as well as long-range systems such as 5G. Networking protocols will be covered, which are the heart of edge systems. Technologies such as MQTT, which make up the backbone of edge to cloud communication, are examined. Then, you will move on to edge applications such as edge predictive AI and federated computing. We wrap up by investigating the security and vulnerability envelope of edge systems.This book is intended to quickly familiarize you with edge systems technologies and use cases, without burdening you with complicated jargon and low-level details.

3648
Ebook

Comet for Data Science. Enhance your ability to manage and optimize the life cycle of your data science project

Angelica Lo Duca, Gideon Mendels

This book provides concepts and practical use cases which can be used to quickly build, monitor, and optimize data science projects. Using Comet, you will learn how to manage almost every step of the data science process from data collection through to creating, deploying, and monitoring a machine learning model.The book starts by explaining the features of Comet, along with exploratory data analysis and model evaluation in Comet. You’ll see how Comet gives you the freedom to choose from a selection of programming languages, depending on which is best suited to your needs. Next, you will focus on workspaces, projects, experiments, and models. You will also learn how to build a narrative from your data, using the features provided by Comet. Later, you will review the basic concepts behind DevOps and how to extend the GitLab DevOps platform with Comet, further enhancing your ability to deploy your data science projects. Finally, you will cover various use cases of Comet in machine learning, NLP, deep learning, and time series analysis, gaining hands-on experience with some of the most interesting and valuable data science techniques available.By the end of this book, you will be able to confidently build data science pipelines according to bespoke specifications and manage them through Comet.