Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts. A comprehensive guide to building reliable, trusted, and effective data platforms

Andrew Jones, Kevin Hu

Despite the passage of time and the evolution of technology and architecture, the challenges we face in building data platforms persist. Our data often remains unreliable, lacks trust, and fails to deliver the promised value.With Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts, you’ll discover the potential of data contracts to transform how you build your data platforms, finally overcoming these enduring problems. You’ll learn how establishing contracts as the interface allows you to explicitly assign responsibility and accountability of the data to those who know it best—the data generators—and give them the autonomy to generate and manage data as required. The book will show you how data contracts ensure that consumers get quality data with clearly defined expectations, enabling them to build on that data with confidence to deliver valuable analytics, performant ML models, and trusted data-driven products.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a comprehensive understanding of how data contracts can revolutionize your organization’s data culture and provide a competitive advantage by unlocking the real value within your data.

ASP.NET MVC 4 Mobile App Development. If your skill-sets include developing in C# on the .NET platform, this tutorial is a golden opportunity to extend your capabilities into mobile app development using the ASP.NET MVC framework. A totally practical primer

Andrew Scott Meadows, Andy Meadows

The ASP.NET MVC 4 framework is used to build scalable web applications with the help of design patterns and .NET Framework. The Model-View-Controller (MVC) is a design principle which separates the components of a web application. This separation helps you to modify, develop, and test different components of a web application.ASP.NET MVC 4 Mobile App Development helps you to develop next generation applications, while guiding you to deal with the constraints the mobile web places on application development. By the end of the book, you will be well versed with all the aspects of mobile app development.ASP.NET MVC 4 Mobile App Development introduces you to developing mobile web apps using the ASP.NET MVC 4 framework. Walking you through the process of creating a homebrew recipe sharing application, this book teaches you the fundamentals and concepts relevant to developing Internet-ready mobile-enabled web apps. Through the sample application, you will learn how to secure your apps against XSS and CSRF attacks, open up your application to users using third party logins such as Google or Facebook, and how to use Razor, HTML 5, and CSS 3 to create custom views and content targeting mobile devices. Using these custom views, you will then learn how to create web apps with a native mobile device feel using jQuery mobile. By the end of the book, you will be presented with a set of challenges to prove to yourself that you now have the skills to extend your existing web applications to the mobile web or create new mobile web apps.

Mastering .NET Machine Learning. Use machine learning in your .NET applications

Jamie Dixon

.Net is one of the widely used platforms for developing applications. With the meteoric rise of Machine learning, developers are now keen on finding out how can they make their .Net applications smarter. Also, .NET developers are interested into moving into the world of devices and how to apply machine learning techniques to, well, machines.This book is packed with real-world examples to easily use machine learning techniques in your business applications. You will begin with introduction to F# and prepare yourselves for machine learning using .NET framework. You will be writing a simple linear regression model using an example which predicts sales of a product. Forming a base with the regression model, you will start using machine learning libraries available in .NET framework such as Math.NET, Numl.NET and Accord.NET with the help of a sample application. You will then move on to writing multiple linear regressions and logistic regressions.You will learn what is open data and the awesomeness of type providers. Next, you are going to address some of the issues that we have been glossing over so far and take a deep dive into obtaining, cleaning, and organizing our data. You will compare the utility of building a KNN and Naive Bayes model to achieve best possible results.Implementation of Kmeans and PCA using Accord.NET and Numl.NET libraries is covered with the help of an example application. We will then look at many of issues confronting creating real-world machine learning models like overfitting and how to combat them using confusion matrixes, scaling, normalization, and feature selection. You will now enter into the world of Neural Networks and move your line of business application to a hybrid scientific application. After you have covered all the above machine learning models, you will see how to deal with very large datasets using MBrace and how to deploy machine learning models to Internet of Thing (IoT) devices so that the machine can learn and adapt on the fly.

Python GUI Programming Cookbook. Over 80 object-oriented recipes to help you create mind-blowing GUIs in Python

Burkhard Meier

ChromeOS System Administrator's Guide. Implement, manage, and optimize ChromeOS features effectively

Dr. Willie Sanders

Google's ChromeOS provides a great platform for technicians, system administrators, developers, and casual users alike, providing a seemingly simplistic architecture that is easy enough for a novice user to begin working with. However, beneath the surface, this operating system boasts a plethora of powerful tools, able to rival any other OS on the market. So, learning how to harness the full potential of the OS is critical for you as a technical worker and user to thrive at your workplace. ChromeOS System Administrator’s Guide will help you reap the benefits of all features of ChromeOS.This book explains ChromeOS’ unique architecture and its built-in tools that perform essential tasks such as managing user accounts, working with data, and launching applications. As you build your foundational knowledge of the OS, you'll be exposed to higher-level concepts such as security, command line, and enterprise management.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to perform a range of system administration tasks within ChromeOS without requiring an alternative operating system, thereby broadening your options as a technician, system administrator, developer, or engineer.

Advanced Splunk. Click here to enter text

Ashish Kumar Tulsiram Yadav

Master the power of Splunk and learn the advanced strategies to get the most out of your machine data with this practical advanced guide. Make sense of the hidden data of your organization – the insight of your servers, devices, logs, traffic and clouds. Advanced Splunk shows you how.Dive deep into Splunk to find the most efficient solution to your data problems. Create the robust Splunk solutions you need to make informed decisions in big data machine analytics. From visualizations to enterprise integration, this well-organized high level guide has everything you need for Splunk mastery.Start with a complete overview of all the new features and advantages of the latest version of Splunk and the Splunk Environment. Go hands on with uploading data, search commands for basic and advanced analytics, advanced visualization techniques, and dashboard customizing. Discover how to tweak Splunk to your needs, and get a complete on Enterprise Integration of Splunk with various analytics and visualization tools. Finally, discover how to set up and use all the new features of the latest version of Splunk.

SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook. Over 90 simple and incredibly effective recipes for transforming your business data into exciting dashboards with SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Xcelsius

Xavier Jean-Marie Hacking, David Lai, XJ Hacking

Xcelsius 2008 was recently included in SAP’s BusinessObjects 4.0 family, rebranding “Xcelsius Enterprise” as “SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0”. With features like flexible design and what-if scenarios, the powerful dashboarding software allows enterprises to make business decisions at a glance, and this book allows you to go far beyond the basics of these techniques. This cookbook full of practical and applicable recipes will enable you to use the full latest capabilities of Dashboard Design to visually transform your business data. A wide range of recipes will equip you with the knowledge and confidence to perform tasks like configuring charts, creating drill- downs, making component colors dynamic, using alerts in maps, building pop-up screens, setting up What-If scenarios, and many more.The recipes begin by covering best practices for using the Dashboard Design spreadsheet, the data-model, and the connection with the components on the canvas, later moving on to some from-the-trenches tricks for using Excel within Dashboard Design. The book then guides you through the exploration of various data visualization components and dashboard interactivity, as well as offering recipes on using alerts, dashboard connectivity, and making the most of the aesthetics of the dashboard. Finally, the recipes conclude by considering the most important add-ons available for Dashboard Design and enabling you to perform relevant and useful tasks straight away.

Apache Spark Graph Processing. Build, process and analyze large-scale graph data effectively with Spark

Rindra Ramamonjison, Rindra Ramamonjison

High Performance with Laravel Octane. Learn to fine-tune and optimize PHP and Laravel apps using Octane and an asynchronous approach

Roberto Butti

Laravel Octane is a very powerful component in the Laravel ecosystem that can help you achieve remarkable app performance. With Laravel Octane, you will find tools (queues, cache, and tables) that facilitate a new asynchronous approach for improving application performance.This book highlights how Laravel Octane works, what steps to take in designing an application from the start, what tools you have at your disposal, and how to set up production environments. It provides complete coverage of the strategies, tools, and best practices to make your apps scalable and performant. This is especially important as optimization is usually the overlooked part in the application development lifecycle. You will explore the asynchronous approach in Laravel and be able to release high-performing applications that have a positive impact on the end-user experience.By the end of this book, you will find yourself designing, developing, and releasing high-performance applications.

Mastering GitHub Actions. Advance your automation skills with the latest techniques for software integration and deployment

Eric Chapman

Navigating GitHub Actions often leaves developers grappling with inefficiencies and collaboration bottlenecks. Mastering GitHub Actions offers solutions to these challenges, ensuring smoother software development.With 16 extensive chapters, this book simplifies GitHub Actions, walking you through its vast capabilities, from team and enterprise features to organization defaults, self-hosted runners, and monitoring tools. You’ll learn how to craft reusable workflows, design bespoke templates, publish actions, incorporate external services, and introduce enhanced security measures. Through hands-on examples, you’ll gain best-practice insights for team-based GitHub Actions workflows and discover strategies for maximizing organization accounts.Whether you’re a software engineer or a DevOps guru, by the end of this book, you'll be adept at amplifying productivity and leveraging automation's might to refine your development process.

Snowflake Cookbook. Techniques for building modern cloud data warehousing solutions

Hamid Mahmood Qureshi, Hammad Sharif

Snowflake is a unique cloud-based data warehousing platform built from scratch to perform data management on the cloud. This book introduces you to Snowflake's unique architecture, which places it at the forefront of cloud data warehouses.You'll explore the compute model available with Snowflake, and find out how Snowflake allows extensive scaling through the virtual warehouses. You will then learn how to configure a virtual warehouse for optimizing cost and performance. Moving on, you'll get to grips with the data ecosystem and discover how Snowflake integrates with other technologies for staging and loading data.As you progress through the chapters, you will leverage Snowflake's capabilities to process a series of SQL statements using tasks to build data pipelines and find out how you can create modern data solutions and pipelines designed to provide high performance and scalability. You will also get to grips with creating role hierarchies, adding custom roles, and setting default roles for users before covering advanced topics such as data sharing, cloning, and performance optimization.By the end of this Snowflake book, you will be well-versed in Snowflake's architecture for building modern analytical solutions and understand best practices for solving commonly faced problems using practical recipes.

Deploying Microsoft 365 Teamwork: Exam MS-300 Guide. Expert tips, techniques, and practices to pass the MS-300 exam on the first attempt

Aaron Guilmette

The Microsoft MS-300 exam is designed to test the knowledge and skills of administrators in deploying, configuring, and managing SharePoint Online, SharePoint Server, SharePoint Hybrid, OneDrive for Business, and Teams. This book offers up-to-date coverage of the important topics based on the MS-300 exam and features question answers and insider tips to help you prepare for certification.Written in a clear, succinct way, the book starts by helping you configure and manage SharePoint Online. You’ll then delve into OneDrive for Business, right from managing users and groups, through to monitoring sharing and security. Further chapters will guide you through working with Teams, with an emphasis on managing identity authentication, resolving issues with the service, and even observing usage patterns. Later, you’ll get up to speed with workload integrations, covering the Yammer business communications platform, before moving on to understand how to integrate Microsoft Stream with SharePoint, Teams, and Yammer. Finally, you’ll learn to develop data governance and user adoption strategies.By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed with SharePoint Online and have learned the essential techniques and concepts you need to know in order to pass the MS-300 certification exam.

Test Automation Engineering Handbook. Learn and implement techniques for building robust test automation frameworks

Manikandan Sambamurthy

This book helps you build a better understanding of test automation and aids in bridging the gap between testing and test automation.The book has been divided into three sections with the first section focusing on preparing you for testing and test automation fundamentals. By the end of this section, you’ll have an understanding of some common automation terms, definitions, and roles. The second section covers the practical implementation of test automation for mobile, web, API and performance. The third section will help you understand how test automation works with CI/CD, and explore the common issues and pitfalls when executing test automation.By the end of this book, you’ll have a better understanding of automation, addressing the common pain points and best practices around test automation.

Infusionsoft Cookbook. Over 88 recipes for effective use of Infusionsoft to mitigate your CRM needs, marketing automation, conducting online business optimally

Paul Sokol

Full Stack FastAPI, React, and MongoDB. Build Python web applications with the FARM stack

Marko Aleksendrić

If you need to develop web applications quickly, where do you turn? Enter the FARM stack. The FARM stack combines the power of the Python ecosystem with REST and MongoDB and makes building web applications easy and fast.This book is a fast-paced, concise, and hands-on beginner’s guide that will equip you with the skills you need to quickly build web applications by diving just deep enough into the intricacies of the stack's components.The book quickly introduces each element of the stack and then helps you merge them to build a medium-sized web application. You'll set up a document store with MongoDB, build a simple API with FastAPI, and create an application with React. Security is crucial on the web, so you'll learn about authentication and authorization with JSON Web Tokens. You'll also understand how to optimize images, cache responses with Redis, and add additional features to your application as well as explore tips, tricks, and best practices to make your development experience a breeze. Before you know it, you'll be deploying the application to different platforms.By the end of this book, you will have built a couple of functional applications efficiently and will have the springboard you need to delve into diverse and more specialized domains.

C++ Windows Programming. Click here to enter text

Stefan Björnander

It is critical that modern developers have the right tools to build practical, user-friendly, and efficient applications in order to compete in today’s market. Through hands-on guidance, this book illustrates and demonstrates C++ best practices and the Small Windows object-oriented class library to ease your development of interactive Windows applications. Begin with a focus on high level application development using Small Windows. Learn how to build four real-world applications which focus on the general problems faced when developing graphical applications. Get essential troubleshooting guidance on drawing, spreadsheet, and word processing applications. Finally finish up with a deep dive into the workings of the Small Windows class library, which will give you all the insights you need to build your own object-oriented class library in C++.

Sass and Compass for Designers. If you know HTML and CSS, then you can have all the power of Sass and Compass at your disposal. This step-by-step guide will take you through the time-saving features that makes it so much easier to create cross-browser CSS

Ben Frain

Mastering the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. Take a deep dive into the world of Windows desktop deployment using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

Jeff Stokes, Manuel Singer

TopicThe Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) provides a comprehensive collection of tools, processes, and guidance for automating desktop and server deployments. It considerably reduces deployment time and standardizes desktop and server images. Moreover, MDT offers improved security and ongoing configuration management. Microsoft Deployment Toolkit is the official supported method of creating and customizing Windows images for deployment.Description:Starting from scratch, this book walks you through the MDT setup, task sequence creation, and image deployment steps in detail. Breaking down the various MDT concepts, this book will give you a thorough understanding of the deployment process.Beginning with imaging concepts and theory, you will go on to build a Microsoft Deployment Toolkit environment. You will understand the intricacies of customizing the default user profile in different versions of Windows. Driver handling can be a challenge for larger organizations; we’ll cover various driver concepts including mandatory driver profiles. ]Other important topics like the User State Migration Tool (USMT), configuration of XML files, and how to troubleshoot the USMT are also discussed in the book.We will cover the verifier and Windows Performance Toolkit for image validation scenarios. Furthermore, you will learn about MDT web frontend implementation as well as how to utilize the database capabilities of MDT for deeper deployment options. We’ll wrap it all up with some links to resources for more information, blogs to watch, and useful Twitter handles.

Federated Learning with Python. Design and implement a federated learning system and develop applications using existing frameworks

Kiyoshi Nakayama PhD, George Jeno

Federated learning (FL) is a paradigm-shifting technology in AI that enables and accelerates machine learning (ML), allowing you to work on private data. It has become a must-have solution for most enterprise industries, making it a critical part of your learning journey. This book helps you get to grips with the building blocks of FL and how the systems work and interact with each other using solid coding examples.FL is more than just aggregating collected ML models and bringing them back to the distributed agents. This book teaches you about all the essential basics of FL and shows you how to design distributed systems and learning mechanisms carefully so as to synchronize the dispersed learning processes and synthesize the locally trained ML models in a consistent manner. This way, you’ll be able to create a sustainable and resilient FL system that can constantly function in real-world operations. This book goes further than simply outlining FL's conceptual framework or theory, as is the case with the majority of research-related literature.By the end of this book, you’ll have an in-depth understanding of the FL system design and implementation basics and be able to create an FL system and applications that can be deployed to various local and cloud environments.

Generative AI Art. Unleash Your Creativity with Generative AI Art for Beginners

Oliver Theobald

The course introduces the basic concepts of artificial intelligence and its application in art, making it accessible even to those without a technical background. This foundation paves the way for exploring the nuances of effective prompt crafting, a critical skill for generating bespoke AI artwork.The course focuses on hands-on demonstrations with leading AI art software, including Craiyon and Midjourney, offering step-by-step guides to harness these tools effectively. Through practical examples, learners will understand how to navigate image prompts, masking techniques, framing, and lighting to enhance the visual appeal of their creations. The significance of navigating these elements is underscored, highlighting their role in achieving consistency and originality in AI-generated art.The course wraps up by delving into the remixing of popular art styles, the art of creating compelling text prompts, and the critical aspects of image rights, ethics, privacy, and originality in the digital art space. By concluding with recommended resources, learners are equipped to continue their journey in AI art, fueled by inspiration and a solid understanding of the field's possibilities and responsibilities.

Moodle 2.0 Course Conversion Beginner's Guide. Teachers, don’t be intimidated by e-learning! This book shows you how to take your existing course materials and transfer them quickly, effectively and – above all – easily into an e-learning course using Moodle. Absolute beginners welcome

Ian Wild, Moodle Trust

Schools, colleges and universities all over the world are installing Moodle, but many educators aren’t making much use of it. With so many features, it can be a hassle to learn – and with teachers under so much pressure day-to-day, they cannot devote much time to recreating all their lessons from scratch.This book provides the quickest way for teachers and trainers to get up and running with Moodle, by turning their familiar teaching materials into a Moodle e-learning course.This book shows how to bring your existing notes, worksheets, resources and lesson plans into Moodle quickly and easily. Instead of exploring every feature of Moodle, the book focuses on getting you started immediately – you will be turning your existing materials into Moodle courses right from the start.The book begins by showing how to turn your teaching schedule into a Moodle course, with the correct number of topics and weeks. You will then see how to convert your resources – documents, slideshows, and worksheets, into Moodle. You will learn how to format them in a way that means students will be able to read them, and along the way plenty of shortcuts to speed up the process.By the end of Chapter 3, you will already have a Moodle course that contains your learning resources in a presentable way. But the book doesn’t end there– you will also see how to use Moodle to accept and assess coursework submissions, discuss work with students, and deliver quizzes, tests, and video.Throughout the book, the focus is on getting results fast – moving teaching material online so that lessons become more effective for students, and less work for you.

Salesforce CRM - The Definitive Admin Handbook. Successfully administer Salesforce CRM and Salesforce mobile implementations with best practices and real-world scenarios

Paul Goodey

The Data Wrangling Workshop. Create your own actionable insights using data from multiple raw sources - Second Edition

Brian Lipp, Shubhadeep Roychowdhury, Dr. Tirthajyoti Sarkar

While a huge amount of data is readily available to us, it is not useful in its raw form. For data to be meaningful, it must be curated and refined.If you’re a beginner, then The Data Wrangling Workshop will help to break down the process for you. You’ll start with the basics and build your knowledge, progressing from the core aspects behind data wrangling, to using the most popular tools and techniques.This book starts by showing you how to work with data structures using Python. Through examples and activities, you’ll understand why you should stay away from traditional methods of data cleaning used in other languages and take advantage of the specialized pre-built routines in Python. Later, you’ll learn how to use the same Python backend to extract and transform data from an array of sources, including the internet, large database vaults, and Excel financial tables. To help you prepare for more challenging scenarios, the book teaches you how to handle missing or incorrect data, and reformat it based on the requirements from your downstream analytics tool.By the end of this book, you will have developed a solid understanding of how to perform data wrangling with Python, and learned several techniques and best practices to extract, clean, transform, and format your data efficiently, from a diverse array of sources.

Java EE 7 First Look. Discover the new features of Java EE 7 and learn to put them together to build a large-scale application

NDJOBO Armel Fabrice, Armel Fabrice NDJOBO

For several years, the development of robust, scalable, and secured applications was a headache for software companies. They had to use proprietary solutions with non-standard methods. With Java EE, many of these solutions have been standardized, simplified, adapted to the needs of the developer, and made freely available to the community. Thus, it is now possible to develop truly robust, secure, and scalable applications at a lower cost using tools such as: Eclipse, NetBeans, and GlassFish.Java EE 7 First Look is a practical guide which, through the creation of an online pre-registration website, will introduce you to the novelties of Java EE 7 and give you ideas for utilizing them.Giving you an insight on new features introduced in Java EE 7, this book begins with the objectives of Java EE 7 and then covers the new specifications added in Java EE 7. Next, you will move on to the improvements made in APIs and EJBs and how to work with them. You will also learn how to ensure that the quality of data is maintained that has been manipulated by your application and gives you the opportunity to put a small part of AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) in action.Finally, the book will give you some ideas to realize n-tier applications using the Java EE platform and will also provide some guidance for the integration of your Java EE application to heterogeneous systems with which your application will interact.After reading Java EE 7 First Look, you'll have a good idea about the changes brought in by Java EE 7, as well as how to make the best use of these to build a large-scale application.