Building Analytics Teams. Harnessing analytics and artificial intelligence for business improvement

John K. Thompson, Douglas B. Laney

In Building Analytics Teams, John K. Thompson, with his 30+ years of experience and expertise, illustrates the fundamental concepts of building and managing a high-performance analytics team, including what to do, who to hire, projects to undertake, and what to avoid in the journey of building an analytically sound team. The core processes in creating an effective analytics team and the importance of the business decision-making life cycle are explored to help achieve initial and sustainable success.The book demonstrates the various traits of a successful and high-performing analytics team and then delineates the path to achieve this with insights on the mindset, advanced analytics models, and predictions based on data analytics. It also emphasizes the significance of the macro and micro processes required to evolve in response to rapidly changing business needs.The book dives into the methods and practices of managing, developing, and leading an analytics team. Once you've brought the team up to speed, the book explains how to govern executive expectations and select winning projects.By the end of this book, you will have acquired the knowledge to create an effective business analytics team and develop a production environment that delivers ongoing operational improvements for your organization.

HTML5 Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide. Make the most of HTML5 techniques to create exciting games from scratch

Seng Hin Mak

Mastering JavaScript Promises

Muzzamil Hussain, Muzzmail Hussain

Learning iOS Security. Enhance the security of your iOS platform and applications using iOS-centric security techniques

Charles S Edge, Allister Banks

Penetration Testing Azure for Ethical Hackers. Develop practical skills to perform pentesting and risk assessment of Microsoft Azure environments

David Okeyode, Karl Fosaaen, Charles Horton

“If you’re looking for this book, you need it.” — 5* Amazon ReviewCurious about how safe Azure really is? Put your knowledge to work with this practical guide to penetration testing. This book offers a no-faff, hands-on approach to exploring Azure penetration testing methodologies, which will get up and running in no time with the help of real-world examples, scripts, and ready-to-use source code.As you learn about the Microsoft Azure platform and understand how hackers can attack resources hosted in the Azure cloud, you'll find out how to protect your environment by identifying vulnerabilities, along with extending your pentesting tools and capabilities. First, you’ll be taken through the prerequisites for pentesting Azure and shown how to set up a pentesting lab. You'll then simulate attacks on Azure assets such as web applications and virtual machines from anonymous and authenticated perspectives.In the later chapters, you'll learn about the opportunities for privilege escalation in Azure tenants and ways in which an attacker can create persistent access to an environment.By the end of this book, you'll be able to leverage your ethical hacking skills to identify and implement different tools and techniques to perform successful penetration tests on your own Azure infrastructure.

OpenLayers Cookbook. The best method to learn the many ways OpenLayers can be used to render data on maps is to dive straight into these recipes. With a mix of basic and advanced techniques, it’s ideal for JavaScript novices and experts alike

Antonio Santiago Perez, Antonio Santiago

Data visualization and analysis has become an important task for many companies. Understanding the basic concepts of GIS and knowing how to visualize data on a map is a required ability for many professionals today. OpenLayers is a JavaScript library to load, display, and render maps from multiple sources on web pages.OpenLayers Cookbook teaches how to work with OpenLayers, one of the most important and complete open source JavaScript libraries.Through an extensive set of recipes, this book shows how to work with the main concepts required to build a GIS web applicationñ maps, raster and vector layers, styling, theming, and so on.OpenLayers Cookbook includes problem solving and how-to recipes for the most common and important tasks. A wide range of topics are covered.The range of recipes includes: creating basic maps, working with raster and vector layers, understanding events and working with main controls, reading features from different data sources, styling features, and understanding the underlying architecture.OpenLayers Cookbook describes solutions and optimizations to problems commonly found.

Unity Multiplayer Games. Take your gaming development skills into the online multiplayer arena by harnessing the power of Unity 4 or 3. This is not a dry tutorial – it uses exciting examples and an enthusiastic approach to bring it all to life

Alan R. Stagner

Unity is a game development engine that is fully integrated with a complete set of intuitive tools and rapid workflows used to create interactive 3D content. Multiplayer games have long been a staple of video games, and online multiplayer games have seen an explosion in popularity in recent years. Unity provides a unique platform for independent developers to create the most in-demand multiplayer experiences, from relaxing social MMOs to adrenaline-pumping competitive shooters.A practical guide to writing a variety of online multiplayer games with the Unity game engine, using a multitude of networking middleware from player-hosted games to standalone dedicated servers to cloud multiplayer technology. You can create a wide variety of online games with the Unity 4 as well as Unity 3 Engine.You will learn all the skills needed to make any multiplayer game you can think of using this practical guide. We break down complex multiplayer games into basic components, for different kinds of games, whether they be large multi-user environments or small 8-player action games. You will get started by learning networking technologies for a variety of situations with a Pong game, and also host a game server and learn to connect to it.Then, we will show you how to structure your game logic to work in a multiplayer environment. We will cover how to implement client-side game logic for player-hosted games and server-side game logic for MMO-style games, as well as how to deal with network latency, unreliability, and security.You will then gain an understanding of the Photon Server while creating a star collector game; and later, the Player.IO by creating a multiplayer RTS prototype game. You will also learn using PubNub with Unity by creating a chatbox application. Unity Multiplayer Games will help you learn how to use the most popular networking middleware available for Unity, from peer-oriented setups to dedicated server technology.

Kibana Essentials. Use the functionalities of Kibana to discover data and build attractive visualizations and dashboards for real-world scenarios

Surendra Mohan, Yuvraj Gupta, Tim Roes

RAG-Driven Generative AI. Build custom retrieval augmented generation pipelines with LlamaIndex, Deep Lake, and Pinecone

Denis Rothman

RAG-Driven Generative AI provides a roadmap for building effective LLM, computer vision, and generative AI systems that balance performance and costs.This book offers a detailed exploration of RAG and how to design, manage, and control multimodal AI pipelines. By connecting outputs to traceable source documents, RAG improves output accuracy and contextual relevance, offering a dynamic approach to managing large volumes of information. This AI book shows you how to build a RAG framework, providing practical knowledge on vector stores, chunking, indexing, and ranking. You’ll discover techniques to optimize your project’s performance and better understand your data, including using adaptive RAG and human feedback to refine retrieval accuracy, balancing RAG with fine-tuning, implementing dynamic RAG to enhance real-time decision-making, and visualizing complex data with knowledge graphs.You’ll be exposed to a hands-on blend of frameworks like LlamaIndex and Deep Lake, vector databases such as Pinecone and Chroma, and models from Hugging Face and OpenAI. By the end of this book, you will have acquired the skills to implement intelligent solutions, keeping you competitive in fields from production to customer service across any project.

Swift 3 New Features. Get up to date with what`s new in Swift 3

Keith Elliott

Since Swift was introduced by Apple in WWDC 2015, it has gone on to become one of the most beloved languages to develop iOS applications with. In the new version, the Swift team aimed to take its adoption to the next level by making it available for new platforms and audiences.This book will very quickly get you up to speed and productive with Swift 3. You will begin by understanding the process of submitting new feature requests for future versions of Swift. Swift 3 allows you to develop and run your applications on a Linux machine. Using this feature, you will write your first Linux application using the debugger in Linux. Using Swift migrator, you will initiate a conversion from Swift 2.2 to Swift 3. Further on, you will learn how to interact with Cocoa libraries when importing Objective C to Swift. You will explore the function and operator changes new to Swift 3, followed by Collection and Closure changes. You will also see the changes in Swift 3 that allow you write tests easier with XCTest and debug your running code better with new formats as well. Finally, you will have a running server written completely in Swift on a Linux box.By the end of the book, you will know everything you need to know to dive into Swift 3 and build successful projects.

Mastering Puppet. Master Puppet for configuration management of your systems in an enterprise deployment - Second Edition

Thomas Uphill

Puppet is a configuration management system and a language. It was written for and by system administrators to manage large numbers of systems efficiently and prevent configuration drifts.Mastering Puppet deals with the issues faced when scaling out Puppet to handle large numbers of nodes. It will show you how to fit Puppet into your enterprise and allow many developers to work on your Puppet code simultaneously. In addition, you will learn to write custom facts and roll your own modules to solve problems. Next, popular options for performing reporting and orchestration tasks will be introduced in this book. Moving over to troubleshooting techniques, which will be very useful. The concepts presented are useful to any size organization. By the end of the book, you will know how to deal with problems of scale and exceptions in your code, automate workflows, and support multiple developers working simultaneously.

Network Architect's Handbook. An expert-led journey to building a successful career as a network architect

Alim H. Ali, Steven Parker, Russell Ware

Becoming a network architect is challenging—it demands hands-on engineering skills, collaboration with internal teams and C-Suite stakeholders, as well as adeptly managing external entities like vendors and service providers. The author taps into his extensive background in IT and security to help you gain a detailed understanding of the network architect's role and guide you in evolving into an effective network architect within an organization, fostering seamless communication with leadership teams and other stakeholders.Starting with a clear definition of the network architect’s role, this book lays out a roadmap and discusses the attributes and mindset for success. You’ll explore network architect design, physical infrastructure routing and switching, and network services such as DNS, MLAG, and service insertion. You’ll also gain insights into the necessary skills and typical daily challenges faced by network architects. And to thoroughly prepare you to advance in your career, this handbook covers certifications and associated training for maintaining relevance in an organization, along with common interview questions for a network architect's position.By the end of this book, you’ll be armed with essential concepts, techniques, and newfound skills to pursue a career as a network architect.

Mastering spaCy. An end-to-end practical guide to implementing NLP applications using the Python ecosystem

Duygu Altinok

spaCy is an industrial-grade, efficient NLP Python library. It offers various pre-trained models and ready-to-use features. Mastering spaCy provides you with end-to-end coverage of spaCy's features and real-world applications.You'll begin by installing spaCy and downloading models, before progressing to spaCy's features and prototyping real-world NLP apps. Next, you'll get familiar with visualizing with spaCy's popular visualizer displaCy. The book also equips you with practical illustrations for pattern matching and helps you advance into the world of semantics with word vectors. Statistical information extraction methods are also explained in detail. Later, you'll cover an interactive business case study that shows you how to combine all spaCy features for creating a real-world NLP pipeline. You'll implement ML models such as sentiment analysis, intent recognition, and context resolution. The book further focuses on classification with popular frameworks such as TensorFlow's Keras API together with spaCy. You'll cover popular topics, including intent classification and sentiment analysis, and use them on popular datasets and interpret the classification results.By the end of this book, you'll be able to confidently use spaCy, including its linguistic features, word vectors, and classifiers, to create your own NLP apps.

Mockito Essentials. A practical guide to get you up and running with unit testing using Mockito

Sujoy Acharya

HBase Administration Cookbook. Master HBase configuration and administration for optimum database performance with this book and

Yifeng Jiang

As an Open Source distributed big data store, HBase scales to billions of rows, with millions of columns and sits on top of the clusters of commodity machines. If you are looking for a way to store and access a huge amount of data in real-time, then look no further than HBase.HBase Administration Cookbook provides practical examples and simple step-by-step instructions for you to administrate HBase with ease. The recipes cover a wide range of processes for managing a fully distributed, highly available HBase cluster on the cloud. Working with such a huge amount of data means that an organized and manageable process is key and this book will help you to achieve that.The recipes in this practical cookbook start from setting up a fully distributed HBase cluster and moving data into it. You will learn how to use all of the tools for day-to-day administration tasks as well as for efficiently managing and monitoring the cluster to achieve the best performance possible. Understanding the relationship between Hadoop and HBase will allow you to get the best out of HBase so the book will show you how to set up Hadoop clusters, configure Hadoop to cooperate with HBase, and tune its performance.

Learning Apache Cassandra. Build an efficient, scalable, fault-tolerant, and highly-available data layer into your application using Cassandra

Matthew Brown

Platform and Model Design for Responsible AI. Design and build resilient, private, fair, and transparent machine learning models

Amita Kapoor, Sharmistha Chatterjee

AI algorithms are ubiquitous and used for tasks, from recruiting to deciding who will get a loan. With such widespread use of AI in the decision-making process, it’s necessary to build an explainable, responsible, transparent, and trustworthy AI-enabled system. With Platform and Model Design for Responsible AI, you’ll be able to make existing black box models transparent.You’ll be able to identify and eliminate bias in your models, deal with uncertainty arising from both data and model limitations, and provide a responsible AI solution. You’ll start by designing ethical models for traditional and deep learning ML models, as well as deploying them in a sustainable production setup. After that, you’ll learn how to set up data pipelines, validate datasets, and set up component microservices in a secure and private way in any cloud-agnostic framework. You’ll then build a fair and private ML model with proper constraints, tune the hyperparameters, and evaluate the model metrics.By the end of this book, you’ll know the best practices to comply with data privacy and ethics laws, in addition to the techniques needed for data anonymization. You’ll be able to develop models with explainability, store them in feature stores, and handle uncertainty in model predictions.

Microsoft Power Platform Enterprise Architecture. A guide for architects and decision makers to craft complex solutions tailored to meet business needs

Robert Rybaric

For forward-looking architects and decision makers who want to craft complex solutions to serve growing business needs, Microsoft Power Platform Enterprise Architecture offers an array of architectural best practices and techniques.With this book, you’ll learn how to design robust software using the tools available in the Power Platform suite and be able to integrate them seamlessly with various Microsoft 365 and Azure components. Unlike most other resources that are overwhelmingly long and unstructured, this book covers essential concepts using concise yet practical examples to help you save time.You’ll develop the skills you need to architect, design, and manage a complex solution as you follow the journey of a fictitious enterprise customer as they enter the world of Power Platform. Throughout the book, you’ll discover how to combine the functionality of Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Virtual Agents with various methodologies to effectively address application lifecycle management, security, and extensibility. Finally, you'll learn how to overcome common challenges in migrating data to and from Microsoft Power Platform using proven techniques.By the end of this book, you’ll have the strategic perspective of an enterprise architect to make accurate architectural decisions for your complex Power Platform projects.

C++20 STL Cookbook. Leverage the latest features of the STL to solve real-world problems

Bill Weinman

Fast, efficient, and flexible, the C++ programming language has come a long way and is used in every area of the industry to solve many problems. The latest version C++20 will see programmers change the way they code as it brings a whole array of features enabling the quick deployment of applications. This book will get you up and running with using the STL in the best way possible.Beginning with new language features in C++20, this book will help you understand the language's mechanics and library features and offer insights into how they work. Unlike other books, the C++20 STL Cookbook takes an implementation-specific, problem-solution approach that will help you overcome hurdles quickly. You'll learn core STL concepts, such as containers, algorithms, utility classes, lambda expressions, iterators, and more, while working on real-world recipes. This book is a reference guide for using the C++ STL with its latest capabilities and exploring the cutting-edge features in functional programming and lambda expressions.By the end of the book C++20 book, you'll be able to leverage the latest C++ features and save time and effort while solving tasks elegantly using the STL.

TypeScript Blueprints. Practical Projects to Put TypeScript into Practice

TypeScript is the future of JavaScript. Having been designed for the development of large applications, it is now being widely incorporated in cutting-edge projects such as Angular 2. Adopting TypeScript results in more robust software - software that is more scalable and performant.It's scale and performance that lies at the heart of every project that features in this book. The lessons learned throughout this book will arm you with everything you need to build some truly amazing projects. You'll build a complete single page app with Angular 2, create a neat mobile app using NativeScript, and even build a Pac Man game with TypeScript. As if fun wasn't enough, you'll also find out how to migrate your legacy codebase from JavaScript to TypeScript.This book isn't just for developers who want to learn - it's for developers who want to develop. So dive in and get started on these TypeScript projects.

Building Expert Business Solutions with Zoho CRM. An indispensable guide to developing future-proof CRM solutions and growing your business exponentially

Dominic Harrington

Zoho CRM is one of the most user-friendly, configurable, and competitively priced CRM systems for managing all your customer relationships. When tailored effectively to your business, it empowers your team to work smarter and helps your business to achieve more profitable and scalable growth. This book will show you how to make the most of Zoho CRM to increase productivity.You’ll start by learning about the foundation modules of Zoho CRM such as Leads, Deals, Contacts, and Accounts, and understand their functionalities that enable you to build effective solutions. Then, you’ll explore innovative workflows that will help you to save time and make sure that your sales teams are proactively managing opportunities and clients. The book also focuses on Zoho Marketplace, as well as how to extend the functionality of Zoho CRM using custom functions. You’ll cover real-world use cases that will inspire you to extend your Zoho adoption by integrating Zoho CRM with other Zoho apps such as Zoho Campaigns, Zoho Forms, Zoho Survey, and SalesIQ. Finally, you’ll discover best practices for adapting and evolving your CRM solutions and maintaining your CRM to achieve continuous improvement.By the end of this CRM book, you’ll have set up a CRM solution that will be fit for the next 10 years of business growth.

Instant Android Fragmentation Management How-to. A complete hands-on guide to solving the biggest problem facing Android application developers today

There are currently 7 different versions of operating systems for Android. A growing issue is fragmentation. With the number of Android users and the variety of versions available, Android fragmentation is a huge problem. This little book is the solution. Instant Android Fragmentation Management How-to is a step-by-step guide to writing applications that can run on all devices starting from Android 1.6. With simple solutions for complex problems, this book will walk you through the biggest issues facing Android developers today.This book will take you through the newest features in the latest version of Android, and shows you how to utilize them in the older versions using the compatibility library. This practical guide allows you to focus on  creating the best application possible without worrying about compatibility.All the heavy lifting is done for you. Using user interface, adapting your application will work perfectly on any Android operating system. Asynchronous data management will also allow your applications to run smoothly on any device.Everything you need to run your app on any version of Android is right here.

DynamoDB Cookbook. Over 90 hands-on recipes to design Internet scalable web and mobile applications with Amazon DynamoDB

Tanmay Deshpande

Learning Vulkan. Discover how to build impressive 3D graphics with the next-generation graphics API—Vulkan

Vulkan, the next generation graphics and compute API, is the latest offering by Khronos. This API is the successor of OpenGL and unlike OpenGL, it offers great flexibility and high performance capabilities to control modern GPU devices. With this book, you'll get great insights into the workings of Vulkan and how you can make stunning graphics run with minimum hardware requirements.We begin with a brief introduction to the Vulkan system and show you its distinct features with the successor to the OpenGL API. First, you will see how to establish a connection with hardware devices to query the available queues, memory types, and capabilities offered. Vulkan is verbose, so before diving deep into programing, you’ll get to grips with debugging techniques so even first-timers can overcome error traps using Vulkan’s layer and extension features. You’ll get a grip on command buffers and acquire the knowledge to record various operation commands into command buffer and submit it to a proper queue for GPU processing. We’ll take a detailed look at memory management and demonstrate the use of buffer and image resources to create drawing textures and image views for the presentation engine and vertex buffers to store geometry information.You'll get a brief overview of SPIR-V, the new way to manage shaders, and you'll define the drawing operations as a single unit of work in the Render pass with the help of attachments and subpasses. You'll also create frame buffers and build a solid graphics pipeline, as well as making use of the synchronizing mechanism to manage GPU and CPU hand-shaking.By the end, you’ll know everything you need to know to get your hands dirty with the coolest Graphics API on the block.