Coding Roblox Games Made Easy. The ultimate guide to creating games with Roblox Studio and Lua programming

Zander Brumbaugh

Roblox is a global virtual platform like no other for both playing and creating games. With well over 150 million monthly active users, Roblox hosts all genres of games that can be played by other members of the community using the Lua programming language. Not only can you create games for free, but you can also earn considerable sums of money if from the success of your games, and become part of the vast and supportive developer circle that provides excellent opportunities for networking in a tight-knit community.With this practical book, you'll get hands-on experience working on the Roblox platform. You'll start with an overview of Roblox development and then understand how to use Roblox Studio. As you progress, you'll gradually learn everything you need from how to program in Roblox Lua to creating Obby and Battle Royale games. Finally, you'll delve into the logistics of game production, focusing on optimizing the performance of your game by implementing impressive mechanics, monetization, and marketing practices.By the end of this Roblox book, you'll be able to lead or work with a team to bring your gaming world to life, and extend that experience to players around the world.

Apache Hive Essentials. Essential techniques to help you process, and get unique insights from, big data - Second Edition

Dayong Du

In this book, we prepare you for your journey into big data by frstly introducing you to backgrounds in the big data domain, alongwith the process of setting up and getting familiar with your Hive working environment. Next, the book guides you through discovering and transforming the values of big data with the help of examples. It also hones your skills in using the Hive language in an effcient manner. Toward the end, the book focuses on advanced topics, such as performance, security, and extensions in Hive, which will guide you on exciting adventures on this worthwhile big data journey. By the end of the book, you will be familiar with Hive and able to work effeciently to find solutions to big data problems

Practical Internet of Things Security. Beat IoT security threats by strengthening your security strategy and posture against IoT vulnerabilities

Drew Van Duren, Brian Russell

With the advent of Internet of Things (IoT), businesses will be faced with defending against new types of threats. The business ecosystem now includes cloud computing infrastructure, mobile and fixed endpoints that open up new attack surfaces, a desire to share information with many stakeholders and a need to take action quickly based on large quantities of collected data. . It therefore becomes critical to ensure that cyber security threats are contained to a minimum when implementing new IoT services and solutions. . The interconnectivity of people, devices, and companies raises stakes to a new level as computing and action become even more mobile, everything becomes connected to the cloud, and infrastructure is strained to securely manage the billions of devices that will connect us all to the IoT. This book shows you how to implement cyber-security solutions, IoT design best practices and risk mitigation methodologies to address device and infrastructure threats to IoT solutions.This book will take readers on a journey that begins with understanding the IoT and how it can be applied in various industries, goes on to describe the security challenges associated with the IoT, and then provides a set of guidelines to architect and deploy a secure IoT in your Enterprise. The book will showcase how the IoT is implemented in early-adopting industries and describe how lessons can be learned and shared across diverse industries to support a secure IoT.

LaTeX Beginner's Guide. When there’s a scientific or technical paper to write, the versatility of LaTeX is very attractive. But where can you learn about the software? The answer is this superb beginner’s guide, packed with examples and explanations

Stefan Kottwitz, Robin TUG

LaTeX is high-quality Open Source typesetting software that produces professional prints and PDF files. However, as LaTeX is a powerful and complex tool, getting started can be intimidating. There is no official support and certain aspects such as layout modifications can seem rather complicated. It may seem more straightforward to use Word or other WYSIWG programs, but once you've become acquainted, LaTeX's capabilities far outweigh any initial difficulties. This book guides you through these challenges and makes beginning with LaTeX easy. If you are writing Mathematical, Scientific, or Business papers, or have a thesis to write, then this is the perfect book for you.LaTeX Beginner's Guide offers you a practical introduction to LaTeX with plenty of step-by-step examples. Beginning with the installation and basic usage, you will learn to typeset documents containing tables, figures, formulas, and common book elements like bibliographies, glossaries, and indexes and go on to managing complex documents and using modern PDF features. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand.This practical book will guide you through the essential steps of LaTeX, from installing LaTeX, formatting, and justification to page design. Right from the beginning, you will learn to use macros and styles to maintain a consistent document structure while saving typing work. You will learn to fine-tune text and page layout, create professional looking tables as well as include figures and write complex mathematical formulas. You will see how to generate bibliographies and indexes with ease. Finally you will learn how to manage complex documents and how to benefit from modern PDF features. Detailed information about online resources like software archives, web forums, and online compilers completes this introductory guide. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand.

ASP.NET Core 5 and React. Full-stack web development using .NET 5, React 17, and TypeScript 4 - Second Edition

Carl Rippon

Microsoft’s .NET framework is a robust server-side framework, now even more powerful thanks to the recent unification of the Microsoft ecosystem with the .NET 5 framework. This updated second edition addresses these changes in the .NET framework and the latest release of React.The book starts by taking you through React and TypeScript components for building an intuitive single-page application and then shows you how to design scalable REST APIs that can integrate with a React-based frontend. Next, you’ll get to grips with the latest features, popular patterns, and tools available in the React ecosystem, including function-based components, React Router, and Redux. As you progress through the chapters, you'll learn how to use React with TypeScript to make the frontend robust and maintainable and cover key ASP.NET 5 features such as API controllers, attribute routing, and model binding to build a sturdy backend. In addition to this, you’ll explore API security with ASP.NET 5 identity and authorization policies and write reliable unit tests using both .NET and React, before deploying your app on Azure.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the knowledge you need to enhance your C# and JavaScript skills and build full-stack, production-ready applications with ASP.NET 5 and React.

Developing Extensions for Joomla! 5. Extend your sites and build rich customizations with Joomla! plugins, modules, and components

Carlos M. Cámara Mora, Brian Teeman

Joomla! 5 is a groundbreaking CMS that helps you take a significant leap into the world of content management systems. Joomla! 5 features a variety of impressive new features that align with current web standards and enable you to experience lightning-fast performance for optimal web page optimization, leverage the new code architecture, and tap into the WebService API, among others.This book takes you on a journey of extending Joomla's capabilities by developing your own extensions. The chapters not only explain the key concepts behind Joomla's architecture but also equip you with the latest techniques for crafting components and plugins. You’ll discover how to leverage existing features within Joomla! to empower your extensions and create tailored solutions. The book takes you from the initial stages of planning your extension development to a fully featured finished product. As you advance, you'll learn invaluable techniques for testing your extension, addressing common issues, and preparing it for publication. The concluding chapters of this comprehensive guide teach you how to test your extension for common issues, along with how to publish the extension for everyone to use.By the end of this book, you’ll have the confidence and skills to complete the cycle of extension development.

SFML Game Development. If you've got a firm grasp of C++ with a secret hankering to create a great game, this book is for you. Every practical aspect of programming an interactive game world is here – the only real limit is your imagination

Artur Moreira, Henrik Vogelius Hansson, Jan Haller, Henrik Valter Vogelius, ...

Game development comprises the combination of many different aspects such as game logics, graphics, audio, user input, physics and much more. SFML is an Open Source C++ library designed to make game development more accessible, exposing multimedia components to the user through a simple, yet powerful interface.If you are a C++ programmer with a stack of ideas in your head and seeking a platform for implementation, your search ends here.Starting with nothing more than a blank screen, SFML Game Development will provide you with all the guidance you need to create your first fully featured 2D game using SFML 2.0. By the end, you'll have learned the basic principles of game development, including advanced topics such as how to network your game, how to utilize particle systems and much more.SFML Game Development starts with an overview of windows, graphics, and user inputs. After this brief introduction, you will start to get to grips with SFML by building up a world of different game objects, and implementing more and more gameplay features. Eventually, you'll be handling advanced visual effects, audio effects and network programming like an old pro. New concepts are discussed, while the code steadily develops.SFML Game Development will get you started with animations, particle effects and shaders. As well as these fundamental game aspects, we're also covering network programming to the extent where you'll be able to support the game running from two different machines. The most important part, the gameplay implementation with enemies and missiles, will make up the core of our top-scrolling airplane shoot' em-up game!You will learn everything you need in SFML Game Development in order to start with game development and come closer to creating your own game.

Koha 3 Library Management System. Install, configure, and maintain your Koha installation with this easy-to-follow guide

Amit Gupta, Savitra Sirohi, Amit Gupta

Koha is the first full-featured open source library management system that is widely used for efficiently managing libraries. However, setting up and maintaining Koha is no walk in the park. It is not as straightforward as setting up the other popular LAMP applications.This practical guide provides all the essential information that is needed to make the task of installing and configuring Koha really seem simple and easy. It demonstrates how to set up Koha and its various aspects – installation, configuration, application administration, and data migration. It also covers troubleshooting, software maintenance, software customization, and other advanced topics.The book starts with installing and configuring the LAMP stack and the Koha application to meet your needs. It then goes deeper into setting up various rules and configuring settings for Koha. It also covers data migration of catalog records, software maintenance, and customization of the application. Chapters are also dedicated to providing an insight into advanced topics such as LDAP integration and Internationalization. Filled with numerous code samples and screenshots, this book will tour you through setting up Koha for evaluation or test purposes. It also includes loads of tips for troubleshooting and maintenance activities.By the end of this book, you will have gained the knowledge to get the most out of your Koha installation.

Learning Probabilistic Graphical Models in R. Familiarize yourself with probabilistic graphical models through real-world problems and illustrative code examples in R

David Bellot, Dan Toomey

Probabilistic graphical models (PGM, also known as graphical models) are a marriage between probability theory and graph theory. Generally, PGMs use a graph-based representation. Two branches of graphical representations of distributions are commonly used, namely Bayesian networks and Markov networks. R has many packages to implement graphical models.We’ll start by showing you how to transform a classical statistical model into a modern PGM and then look at how to do exact inference in graphical models. Proceeding, we’ll introduce you to many modern R packages that will help you to perform inference on the models. We will then run a Bayesian linear regression and you’ll see the advantage of going probabilistic when you want to do prediction. Next, you’ll master using R packages and implementing its techniques. Finally, you’ll be presented with machine learning applications that have a direct impact in many fields. Here, we’ll cover clustering and the discovery of hidden information in big data, as well as two important methods, PCA and ICA, to reduce the size of big problems.

Mastering Azure Serverless Computing. A practical guide to building and deploying enterprise-grade serverless applications using Azure Functions

Lorenzo Barbieri, Massimo Bonanni

Application development has evolved from traditional monolithic app development to using serverless options and microservices. This book is designed to guide you through using Microsoft's Azure Functions to process data, integrate systems, and build simple APIs and microservices.You will discover how to apply serverless computing to speed up deployment and reduce downtime. You'll also explore Azure Functions, including its core functionalities and essential tools, along with understanding how to debug and even customize Azure Functions. In addition to this, the book will take you through how you can effectively implement DevOps and automation in your working environment. Toward the concluding chapters, you'll cover some quick tips, troubleshooting techniques, and real-world serverless use cases that will help you make the most of serverless computing.By the end of this book, you will have gained the skills you need to develop and deliver cost-effective Azure serverless solutions.

Mastering Lumion 3D. Master the art of creating real-time 3D architectural visualizations using Lumion 3D

Ciro Cardoso

Raspberry Pi for Secret Agents. Turn your Raspberry Pi into your very own secret agent toolbox with this set of exciting projects

Stefan Sjogelid

MooTools 1.3 Cookbook. Over 110 highly effective recipes to turbo-charge the user interface of any web-enabled Internet application and web page

Jay Larry G. Johnston, Jay L Johnston

MooTools is a JavaScript framework that abstracts the JavaScript language. JavaScript itself, complex in syntax, provides the tools to write a layer of content interaction for each different browser. MooTools abstracts those individual, browser-specific layers to allow cross-browser scripting in an easy-to-read and easy-to-remember syntax.Animation and interaction, once the domain of Flash, are being taken by storm by the MooTools JavaScript framework, which can cause size, shape, color, and opacity to transition smoothly. Discover how to use AJAX to bring data to today's web page users who demand interactivity without clunky page refreshes. When searching for animation and interactivity solutions that work, MooTools 1.3 Cookbook has individual, reusable code examples that get you running fast!MooTools 1.3 Cookbook readies programmers to animate, perform AJAX, and attach event listeners in a simple format where each section provides a clear and cross-browser compatible sketch of how to solve a problem, whether reading from beginning to finish or browsing directly to a particular recipe solution.MooTools 1.3 Cookbook provides instant solutions to MooTools problems – whatever you want to do with MooTools, this book will tell you how to do it.MooTools 1.3 Cookbook is presented in a progressive order that builds concepts and ideas, while simultaneously being a collection of powerful individual, standalone, recipe solutions.

Mastering SOLIDWORKS Sheet Metal. Enhance your 3D modeling skills by learning all aspects of the SOLIDWORKS Sheet Metal module

Johno Ellison

SOLIDWORKS© is the premier software choice for 3D engineering and product design applications across a wide range of industries, and the Sheet Metal module forms an important part of this powerful program.This book will help you to understand exactly what Sheet Metal is, why it is used, and how you can make the most of this fundamental design feature. You’ll start by understanding the basic tools, including Base Flanges and Sketched Bends, before moving on to more complex features such as Custom Forming Tools and Lofted Bends. The book covers all the necessary tools in a step-by-step manner and shares practical manufacturing tips and tricks that will allow you to apply the skills that you learn to real-world situations.By the end of this SOLIDWORKS book, you’ll have understood how to make the best use of SOLIDWORKS Sheet Metal tools and be able to create a whole range of 3D models and designs confidently.

Mastering Service Mesh. Enhance, secure, and observe cloud-native applications with Istio, Linkerd, and Consul

Anjali Khatri, Vikram Khatri, Dinesh Nirmal, Hamid Pirahesh, ...

Although microservices-based applications support DevOps and continuous delivery, they can also add to the complexity of testing and observability. The implementation of a service mesh architecture, however, allows you to secure, manage, and scale your microservices more efficiently. With the help of practical examples, this book demonstrates how to install, configure, and deploy an efficient service mesh for microservices in a Kubernetes environment.You'll get started with a hands-on introduction to the concepts of cloud-native application management and service mesh architecture, before learning how to build your own Kubernetes environment. While exploring later chapters, you'll get to grips with the three major service mesh providers: Istio, Linkerd, and Consul. You'll be able to identify their specific functionalities, from traffic management, security, and certificate authority through to sidecar injections and observability.By the end of this book, you will have developed the skills you need to effectively manage modern microservices-based applications.

Instant Yii 1.1 Application Development Starter. Get started with building attractive PHP web applications with the Yii framework

Jacob Mumm, Mark Safronov

PHP is one of the most popular languages for building web sites and applications. While the Yii framework came a little bit later to the PHP scene, it has taken a lot of the best practices from around the Web and put it all into a single, awesome framework for making custom web apps.Yii 1.1 Application Development Starter is a straightforward, hands-on look at what is rapidly becoming one of the most revered frameworks for custom web application development. The Yii framework follows a tried and true object-oriented software development pattern called Model-View-Controller, making it quick and easy to build database driven applications.This book takes you through everything you need to know to get set up and rolling with the Yii framework. You will learn how to plan and start your application and how to take it where you want to go with the tools and extensions available with the Yii framework.This book will teach you how to build an application from the ground up, how to make sure you have everything you need in your hosting environment and get the Yii framework installed, how to create a strong relational database design, and how to set up model classes for your tables. You will also learn how to generate CRUD code to add/remove, view, and list records from your tables, then add custom routes, widgets, and extensions to make a robust application. Additionally, you will learn how to integrate authentication and role-based access permissions throughout your site. With this book, you will learn everything you need to get started with web application development using the Yii PHP framework.

Practical Microservices with Dapr and .NET. A developer's guide to building cloud-native applications using the event-driven runtime - Second Edition

Davide Bedin, Mark Russinovich

This second edition will help you get to grips with microservice architectures and how to manage application complexities with Dapr in no time. You'll understand how Dapr simplifies development while allowing you to work with multiple languages and platforms. Following a C# sample, you'll understand how Dapr's runtime, building blocks, and software development kits (SDKs) help you to simplify the creation of resilient and portable microservices.Dapr provides an event-driven runtime that supports the essential features you need for building microservices, including service invocation, state management, and publish/subscribe messaging. You'll explore all of those in addition to various other advanced features with this practical guide to learning Dapr. With a focus on deploying the Dapr sample application to an Azure Kubernetes Service cluster and to the Azure Container Apps serverless platform, you’ll see how to expose the Dapr application with NGINX, YARP, and Azure API Management.By the end of this book, you'll be able to write microservices easily by implementing industry best practices to solve problems related to distributed systems.

Django Design Patterns and Best Practices. Easily build maintainable websites with powerful and relevant Django design patterns

Arun Ravindran

Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming. Add powerful, believable, and fun AI entities in your game with the power of Unity - Fifth Edition

Dr. Davide Aversa

Developing artificial intelligence (AI) for game characters in Unity has never been easier. Unity provides game and app developers with a variety of tools to implement AI, from basic techniques to cutting-edge machine learning-powered agents. Leveraging these tools via Unity's API or built-in features allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating game worlds and characters.The updated fifth edition of Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming starts by breaking down AI into simple concepts. Using a variety of examples, the book then takes those concepts and walks you through actual implementations designed to highlight key concepts and features related to game AI in Unity. As you progress, you’ll learn how to implement a finite state machine (FSM) to determine how your AI behaves, apply probability and randomness to make games less predictable, and implement a basic sensory system. Later, you’ll understand how to set up a game map with a navigation mesh, incorporate movement through techniques such as A* pathfinding, and provide characters with decision-making abilities using behavior trees.By the end of this Unity book, you’ll have the skills you need to bring together all the concepts and practical lessons you’ve learned to build an impressive vehicle battle game.

Selenium Design Patterns and Best Practices. Build a powerful, stable, and automated test suite using Selenium WebDriver

Dima Kovalenko

PhoneGap and AngularJS for Cross-platform Development. Build exciting cross-platform applications using PhoneGap and AngularJS

Yuxian E Liang

PhoneGap is a mobile development framework that allows developers to build cross-platform mobile applications. Building PhoneGap apps is traditionally done using HTML, CSS, jQuery Mobile, Eclipse Editor, and/or Xcode. The process can be cumbersome, from setting up your editor to optimizing your usage of jQuery, and so on. However, AngularJS, a new but highly popular JavaScript framework, eases these tasks with APIs to get access to mobile APIs such as notifications, geo-location, accelerometers, and more. Starting with the absolute basics of building an AngularJS application, this book will teach you how to quickly set up PhoneGap apps using the command-line interface.You will learn how to create simple to advanced to-do lists and add authentication capabilities using PhoneGap's plugins. You will enhance your skills by writing a PhoneGap app using your newly learned AngularJS skills. Furthermore, you will learn about adding animation and interactive designs to your mobile web apps using PhoneGap plugins. By the end of the book, you will know everything you need to launch your app on both Android and iOS devices.

OpenCV for Secret Agents. Use OpenCV in six secret projects to augment your home, car, phone, eyesight, and any photo or drawing

Joseph Howse

Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook. Solve real-world Magento sales problems with a collection of simple but effective recipes

Roy Rubin, William Rice, William Rice

Magento is a feature-rich, professional open source e-commerce solution that offers users complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Although Magento provides users with the power to create dynamic e-commerce sites, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and create sites that are tailored to your unique business needs.This book gives you a hands-on experience on Magento, helping you increase your revenue by implementing proven sales tactics on your Magento site.This book contains techniques to help you with each stage of selling to your customers: attracting visitors, driving them to your product pages, making the sale, increasing sales, engaging your customers, and more. It contains a powerful mix of techniques for increasing sales in your online storefront. Over thirty of the techniques are short and stand alone. A few are designed to be used together, such as the seven techniques in the chapter on creating an international storefront. Some techniques make creative use of Magento’s standard features. A few techniques combine Magento with other tools, such as social networking sites. All the techniques are explained in clear, step-by-step directions, with many screenshots. The book uses an example site for each technique, so that you can see exactly how it will affect your storefront. You can jump into the book at any point, or, work through it from beginning to end.

Maximize Your Investment: 10 Key Strategies for Effective Packaged Software Implementations. Accelerate packaged (COTS) software implementations, increase returns on investment, and reduce implementation costs and customizations with this book and

Grady Brett Beaubouef

Using packaged software for Customer Relationship Management or Enterprise Resource Planning is often seen as a sure-fire way to reduce costs, refocus scarce resources, and increase returns on investment. However, research shows that the majority of packaged or Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) implementations fail to provide this value due to the implementation approach taken.Authored by Grady Brett Beaubouef, who has over fifteen years of packaged software implementation experience, this book will help you define an effective implementation strategy for your packaged software investment.The book focuses on Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) implementations, and helps you to successfully implement packaged software. Using a step-by-step approach, it begins with an assessment of the limitations of current implementation methods for packaged software. It then helps you to analyze your requirements and offers 10 must-know principles gleaned from real-world packaged software implementations. These 10 principles cover how to maximize enhancements and minimize customizations, focus on business results, and negotiate for success, and so on. You will learn how to best leverage these principles as part of your implementation. As you progress through the book, you will learn how to put packaged software into action with forethought, planning, and proper execution. Doing so will lead to reductions in implementation costs, customizations, and development time.