Blender 3D Incredible Models. A comprehensive guide to hard-surface modeling, procedural texturing, and rendering

Arijan Belec

Blender is a massively popular and powerful 3D program, with versatile modeling abilities that make it a great way to enter the 3D modelling world.Blender 3D Incredible Models is an extensive guide for those new to hard-surface modeling with Blender, helping you understand the complete range of tools and features it offers and how to employ those efficiently to create realistic models. You’ll be led through progressively more challenging modeling projects— from an assault rifle and an army tank to a sci-fi spaceship model—giving you a glimpse of all the skills you’d need in Blender’s vast ecosystem of features and functionality, ranging from textures, rendering, and UV mapping to lighting, rigging, and beyond. Each engaging project builds upon the last until you’re equipped with everything you need to tackle your own modeling challenges, whatever they may be.By the end of this Blender book, you won’t just know how to create the models covered here, but you’ll be able to turn your own concepts and references into 3D Blender models too!

Delphi Cookbook. Recipes to master Delphi for IoT integrations, cross-platform, mobile and server-side development - Third Edition

Daniele Spinetti, Daniele Teti

Delphi is a cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE) that supports rapid application development on different platforms, saving you the pain of wandering amid GUI widget details or having to tackle inter-platform incompatibilities. Delphi Cookbook begins with the basics of Delphi and gets you acquainted with JSON format strings, XSLT transformations, Unicode encodings, and various types of streams. You’ll then move on to more advanced topics such as developing higher-order functions and using enumerators and run-time type information (RTTI). As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll understand Delphi RTL functions, use FireMonkey in a VCL application, and cover topics such as multithreading, using aparallel programming library and deploying Delphi on a server. You’ll take a look at the new feature of WebBroker Apache modules, join the mobile revolution with FireMonkey, and learn to build data-driven mobile user interfaces using the FireDAC database access framework. This book will also show you how to integrate your apps with Internet of Things (IoT).By the end of the book, you will have become proficient in Delphi by exploring its different aspects such as building cross-platforms and mobile applications, designing server-side programs, and integrating these programs with IoT.

Learn Java 12 Programming. A step-by-step guide to learning essential concepts in Java SE 10, 11, and 12

Nick Samoylov

Java is one of the preferred languages among developers, used in everything right from smartphones, and game consoles to even supercomputers, and its new features simply add to the richness of the language. This book on Java programming begins by helping you learn how to install the Java Development Kit. You will then focus on understanding object-oriented programming (OOP), with exclusive insights into concepts like abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, which will help you when programming for real-world apps. Next, you’ll cover fundamental programming structures of Java such as data structures and algorithms that will serve as the building blocks for your apps. You will also delve into core programming topics that will assist you with error handling, debugging, and testing your apps. As you progress, you’ll move on to advanced topics such as Java libraries, database management, and network programming, which will hone your skills in building professional-grade apps.Further on, you’ll understand how to create a graphic user interface using JavaFX and learn to build scalable apps by taking advantage of reactive and functional programming.By the end of this book, you’ll not only be well versed with Java 10, 11, and 12, but also gain a perspective into the future of this language and software development in general.

3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook. A comprehensive guide to exploring rendering algorithms in modern OpenGL and Vulkan

Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov

OpenGL is a popular cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) used for rendering 2D and 3D graphics, while Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics API that targets high-performance applications. 3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook helps you learn about modern graphics rendering algorithms and techniques using C++ programming along with OpenGL and Vulkan APIs.The book begins by setting up a development environment and takes you through the steps involved in building a 3D rendering engine with the help of basic, yet self-contained, recipes. Each recipe will enable you to incrementally add features to your codebase and show you how to integrate different 3D rendering techniques and algorithms into one large project. You'll also get to grips with core techniques such as physically based rendering, image-based rendering, and CPU/GPU geometry culling, to name a few. As you advance, you'll explore common techniques and solutions that will help you to work with large datasets for 2D and 3D rendering. Finally, you'll discover how to apply optimization techniques to build performant and feature-rich graphics applications.By the end of this 3D rendering book, you'll have gained an improved understanding of best practices used in modern graphics APIs and be able to create fast and versatile 3D rendering frameworks.

Monitoring Elasticsearch

Dan Noble, Pulkit Agrawal, Mahmoud Lababidi

ElasticSearch is a distributed search server similar to Apache Solr with a focus on large datasets, a schema-less setup, and high availability. This schema-free architecture allows ElasticSearch to index and search unstructured content, making it perfectly suited for both small projects and large big data warehouses with petabytes of unstructured data.This book is your toolkit to teach you how to keep your cluster in good health, and show you how to diagnose and treat unexpected issues along the way. You will start by getting introduced to ElasticSearch, and look at some common performance issues that pop up when using the system. You will then see how to install and configure ElasticSearch and the ElasticSearch monitoring plugins. Then, you will proceed to install and use the Marvel dashboard to monitor ElasticSearch. You will find out how to troubleshoot some of the common performance and reliability issues that come up when using ElasticSearch. Finally, you will analyze your cluster’s historical performance, and get to know how to get to the bottom of and recover from system failures.This book will guide you through several monitoring tools, and utilizes real-world cases and dilemmas faced when using ElasticSearch, showing you how to solve them simply, quickly, and cleanly.

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager. Deploy a scalable solution by ensuring high availability and disaster recovery using Configuration Manager with this book and

Marius Sandbu

Microsoft Configuration Manager is both extensive and complex, and for many, it is the primary tool for Enterprise management. With each new release, Configuration Manager continually proves itself to be the ultimate solution for managing both clients and mobile devices.This book covers in detailed and easy-to-understand steps how to set up highly available Configuration Manager roles and backend services such as SQL, DNS, and AD. You will learn how to plan for high availability, what kind of roles there are, and how they scale.The book starts by examining what needs to be taken into account when planning for high availability before moving on to focus on the different roles and how they can be set up. The book will also go through different scenarios as well as various backup and recovery procedures. You will learn how to identify bottlenecks within the different components and create sample design scenarios for high availability on Configuration Manager. The book will also look at the different high availability options and how to deploy them.

Modernizing Oracle Tuxedo Applications with Python. A practical guide to using Oracle Tuxedo in the 21st century

Aivars Kalvans

Despite being developed in the 1980s, Oracle Tuxedo still runs a significant part of critical infrastructure and is not going away any time soon. Modernizing Oracle Tuxedo Applications with Python will help you get to grips with the most important Tuxedo concepts by writing Python code.The book starts with an introduction to Oracle Tuxedo and guides you in installing its latest version and Python bindings for Tuxedo on Linux. You'll then learn how to build your first server and client, configure Tuxedo, and start running an application. As you advance, you'll understand load balancing and work with the BBL server, which is at the heart of a Tuxedo application. This Tuxedo book will also cover Boolean expressions and different ways to export Tuxedo buffers for storage and transmission, before showing you how to implement servers and clients and use the management information base to change the configuration dynamically. Once you've learned how to configure Tuxedo for transactions and control them in application code, you'll discover how to use the store-and-forward functionality to reach destinations and use an Oracle database from a Tuxedo application.By the end of this Oracle Tuxedo book, you'll be able to perform common Tuxedo programming tasks with Python and integrate Tuxedo applications with other parts of modern infrastructure.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 Professional Reporting. Discover tips and trick for Dynamics NAV report building

Steven Renders

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.

Learning Predictive Analytics with R. Get to grips with key data visualization and predictive analytic skills using R

Eric Mayor

This book is packed with easy-to-follow guidelines that explain the workings of the many key data mining tools of R, which are used to discover knowledge from your data.You will learn how to perform key predictive analytics tasks using R, such as train and test predictive models for classification and regression tasks, score new data sets and so on. All chapters will guide you in acquiring the skills in a practical way. Most chapters also include a theoretical introduction that will sharpen your understanding of the subject matter and invite you to go further.The book familiarizes you with the most common data mining tools of R, such as k-means, hierarchical regression, linear regression, association rules, principal component analysis, multilevel modeling, k-NN, Naïve Bayes, decision trees, and text mining. It also provides a description of visualization techniques using the basic visualization tools of R as well as lattice for visualizing patterns in data organized in groups. This book is invaluable for anyone fascinated by the data mining opportunities offered by GNU R and its packages.

Vector Search for Practitioners with Elastic. A toolkit for building NLP solutions for search, observability, and security using vector search

Bahaaldine Azarmi, Jeff Vestal, Shay Banon

While natural language processing (NLP) is largely used in search use cases, this book aims to inspire you to start using vectors to overcome equally important domain challenges like observability and cybersecurity. The chapters focus mainly on integrating vector search with Elastic to enhance not only their search but also observability and cybersecurity capabilities.The book, which also features a foreword written by the founder of Elastic, begins by teaching you about NLP and the functionality of Elastic in NLP processes. Here you’ll delve into resource requirements and find out how vectors are stored in the dense-vector type along with specific page cache requirements for fast response times. As you advance, you’ll discover various tuning techniques and strategies to improve machine learning model deployment, including node scaling, configuration tuning, and load testing with Rally and Python. You’ll also cover techniques for vector search with images, fine-tuning models for improved performance, and the use of clip models for image similarity search in Elasticsearch. Finally, you’ll explore retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and learn to integrate ChatGPT with Elasticsearch to leverage vectorized data, ELSER's capabilities, and RRF's refined search mechanism.By the end of this NLP book, you’ll have all the necessary skills needed to implement and optimize vector search in your projects with Elastic.

Mastering Unity Game Development with C#. Harness the full potential of Unity 2022 game development using C#

Mohamed Essam

Do you want to level up your Unity game development skills? Then look no further! This book is your one-stop solution to creating mesmerizing games with lifelike features and captivating gameplay.Written by a highly experienced Unity developer, this book emphasizes project organization, clean C# code, and Unity plugins, including the new Input System and Cinemachine. Mastering Unity Game Development with C# shows you how to structure projects effectively, write clean and modular code, utilize the power of Unity plugins, and design engaging game mechanics. You’ll also understand how to optimize user interfaces for a seamless player experience, manage game data efficiently, contribute to existing code bases, integrate third-party assets and APIs, and apply optimization techniques to enhance game performance.By the end of this book, you’ll have acquired the knowledge and skills that will empower you to create efficient and engaging games.

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.

Raspberry Pi Android Projects. Create exciting projects by connecting the Raspberry Pi to your Android phone

Gökhan Kurt

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.

Hyper-V Security. Secure your Hyper-V hosts, their guests, and critical services from intruders and malware

Eric Siron, Andrew Syrewicze

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.

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.

Puppet: Mastering Infrastructure Automation

Jaime Soriano Pastor

Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control. It was written for and by system administrators to manage large numbers of systems efficiently and prevent configuration drifts. Puppet gives you control of what you do to each node, when you do it, and how you do it.This Learning Path will take you from the basics of Puppet to extending it and then mastering it. We will start off with a primer on Puppet, its installation and get a sneak peek under its hood. We will then move on to designing and deploying your Puppet architecture, learning best practices for writing reusable and maintainable code, and executing, testing, and deploying Puppet across your systems. Finally, we will deal with problems of scale and exceptions in your code, automate workflows, and support multiple developers working simultaneously.This course is based on the following books: 1)Puppet 4 Essentials - Second Edition 2)Extending Puppet - Second Edition 3)Mastering Puppet - Second Edition

Modernizing Drupal 10 Theme Development. Build fast, responsive Drupal websites with custom theme design to deliver a rich user experience

Luca Lusso

Working with themes in Drupal can be challenging, given the number of layers and APIs involved. Modernizing Drupal 10 Theme Development helps you explore the new Drupal 10’s theme layer in depth.With a fully implemented Drupal website on the one hand and a set of Storybook components on the other, you’ll begin by learning to create a theme from scratch to match the desired final layout. Once you’ve set up a local environment, you’ll get familiarized with design systems and learn how to map them to the structures of a Drupal website. Next, you’ll bootstrap your new theme and optimize Drupal’s productivity using tools such as webpack, Tailwind CSS, and Browsersync. As you advance, you’ll delve into all the theme layers in a step-by-step way, starting from how Drupal builds an HTML page to where the template files are and how to add custom CSS and JavaScript. You’ll also discover how to leverage all the Drupal APIs to implement robust and maintainable themes without reinventing the wheel, but by following best practices and methodologies. Toward the end, you’ll find out how to build a fully decoupled website using json:api and Next.js.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to confidently build custom Drupal themes to deliver state-of-the-art websites and keep ahead of the competition in the modern frontend world.

Practical Machine Learning with R. Define, build, and evaluate machine learning models for real-world applications

Brindha Priyadarshini Jeyaraman, Ludvig Renbo Olsen, Monicah Wambugu

With huge amounts of data being generated every moment, businesses need applications that apply complex mathematical calculations to data repeatedly and at speed. With machine learning techniques and R, you can easily develop these kinds of applications in an efficient way.Practical Machine Learning with R begins by helping you grasp the basics of machine learning methods, while also highlighting how and why they work. You will understand how to get these algorithms to work in practice, rather than focusing on mathematical derivations. As you progress from one chapter to another, you will gain hands-on experience of building a machine learning solution in R. Next, using R packages such as rpart, random forest, and multiple imputation by chained equations (MICE), you will learn to implement algorithms including neural net classifier, decision trees, and linear and non-linear regression. As you progress through the book, you’ll delve into various machine learning techniques for both supervised and unsupervised learning approaches. In addition to this, you’ll gain insights into partitioning the datasets and mechanisms to evaluate the results from each model and be able to compare them. By the end of this book, you will have gained expertise in solving your business problems, starting by forming a good problem statement, selecting the most appropriate model to solve your problem, and then ensuring that you do not overtrain it.

Mastering Selenium WebDriver 3.0. Boost the performance and reliability of your automated checks by mastering Selenium WebDriver - Second Edition

Mark Collin

The second edition of Mastering Selenium 3.0 WebDriver starts by showing you how to build your own Selenium framework with Maven. You'll then look at how you can solve the difficult problems that you will undoubtedly come across as you start using Selenium in an enterprise environment and learn how to produce the right feedback when failing. Next, you’ll explore common exceptions that you will come across as you use Selenium, the root causes of these exceptions, and how to fix them. Along the way, you’ll use Advanced User Interactions APIs, running any JavaScript you need through Selenium; and learn how to quickly spin up a Selenium Grid using Docker containers. In the concluding chapters, you‘ll work through a series of scenarios that demonstrate how to extend Selenium to work with external libraries and applications so that you can be sure you are using the right tool for the job.

Swift Essentials. Get up and running lightning fast with this practical guide to building applications with Swift

ServiceNow for Architects and Project Leaders. A complete guide to driving innovation, creating value, and making an impact with ServiceNow

Roy Justus, David Zhao

ServiceNow is the leading enterprise service management platform that enables the effective management of services in a modern enterprise.In this audiobook, you’ll learn how to avoid pitfalls that can challenge value realization, where to focus, how to balance tradeoffs, and how to get buy-in for complex decisions. You’ll understand the key drivers of value in ServiceNow implementation and how to structure your program for successful delivery. Moving ahead, you’ll get practical guidance on the methods and considerations in securely using ServiceNow. You’ll also learn how to set up a multi-instance environment including best practices, patterns and alternatives in the use and maintenance of a multi-instance pipeline. Later chapters cover methods and approaches to design processes that deliver optimal ROI. Further, you’ll receive tips for designing technical standards, designing for scale, ensuring maintainability, and building a supportable instance. Finally, you’ll focus on the innovative possibilities that can be unlocked in a ServiceNow journey which will help you to manage uncertainty and claim the value of being an early adopter.By the end of this audiobook, you’ll be prepared to lead or support a ServiceNow implementation with confidence that you’re bringing not only a solution but also making an impact in your organization.