Fixing Bad UX Designs. Master proven approaches, tools, and techniques to make your user experience great again

Lisandra Maioli

Have your web applications been experiencing more hits and less conversions? Are bad designs consuming your time and money?This book is the answer to these problems. With intuitive case studies, you’ll learn to simplify, fix, and enhance some common, real-world application designs. You’ll look at the common issues of simplicity, navigation, appearance, maintenance, and many more.The challenge that most UX designers face is to ensure that the UX is user-friendly. In this book, we address this with individual case studies starting with some common UX applications and then move on to complex applications. Each case study will help you understand the issues faced by a bad UX and teach you to break it down and fix these problems.As we progress, you’ll learn about the information architecture, usability testing, iteration, UX refactoring, and many other related features with the help of various case studies. You’ll also learn some interesting UX design tools with the projects covered in the book.By the end of the book, you’ll be armed with the knowledge to fix bad UX designs and to ensure great customer satisfaction for your applications.

The Agile Developer's Handbook. Get more value from your software development: get the best out of the Agile methodology

Paul Flewelling

This book will help you overcome the common challenges you’ll face when transforming your working practices from waterfall to Agile. Each chapter builds on the last, starting with easy-to-grasp ways to get going with Agile. Next you’ll see how to choose the right Agile framework for your organization. Moving on, you’ll implement systematic product delivery and measure and report progress with visualization. Then you’ll learn how to create high performing teams, develop people in Agile, manage in Agile, and perform distributed Agile and collaborative governance.At the end of the book, you’ll discover how Agile will help your company progressively deliver software to customers, increase customer satisfaction, and improve the level of efficiency in software development teams.

Mastering Kali Linux for Web Penetration Testing. The ultimate defense against complex organized threats and attacks

Michael McPhee

You will start by delving into some common web application architectures in use, both in private and public cloud instances. You will also learn about the most common frameworks for testing, such as OWASP OGT version 4, and how to use them to guide your efforts. In the next section, you will be introduced to web pentesting with core tools and you will also see how to make web applications more secure through rigorous penetration tests using advanced features in open source tools. The book will then show you how to better hone your web pentesting skills in safe environments that can ensure low-risk experimentation with the powerful tools and features in Kali Linux that go beyond a typical script-kiddie approach. After establishing how to test these powerful tools safely, you will understand how to better identify vulnerabilities, position and deploy exploits, compromise authentication and authorization, and test the resilience and exposure applications possess.By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with the web service architecture to identify and evade various protection mechanisms that are used on the Web today. You will leave this book with a greater mastery of essential test techniques needed to verify the secure design, development, and operation of your customers' web applications.

Azure Serverless Computing Cookbook. Build applications hosted on serverless architecture using Azure Functions

Praveen Kumar Sreeram

Microsoft provides a solution to easily run small segment of code in the Cloud with Azure Functions. Azure Functions provides solutions for processing data, integrating systems, and building simple APIs and microservices.The book starts with intermediate-level recipes on serverless computing along with some use cases on benefits and key features of Azure Functions. Then, we’ll deep dive into the core aspects of Azure Functions such as the services it provides, how you can develop and write Azure functions, and how to monitor and troubleshoot them. Moving on, you’ll get practical recipes on integrating DevOps with Azure functions, and providing continuous integration and continous deployment with Visual Studio Team Services. It also provides hands-on steps and tutorials based on real-world serverless use cases, to guide you through configuring and setting up your serverless environments with ease. Finally, you’ll see how to manage Azure functions, providing enterprise-level security and compliance to your serverless code architecture. By the end of this book, you will have all the skills required to work with serverless code architecture, providing continuous delivery to your users.

React Native By Example. Native mobile development with React

Richard Kho, Tyler McGinnis

React Native's ability to build performant mobile applications with JavaScript has resulted in its popularity amongst developers. Developers now have the luxury to create incredible mobile experiences that look and feel native to their platforms with the comfort of a well-known language and the popular React.js library.This book will show you how to build your own native mobile applications for the iOS and Android platforms while leveraging the finesse and simplicity of JavaScript and React.Throughout the book you will build three projects, each of increasing complexity. You will also link up with the third-party Facebook SDK, convert an app to support the Redux architecture, and learn the process involved in making your apps available for sale on the iOS App Store and Google Play.At the end of this book, you will have learned and implemented a wide breadth of core APIs and components found in the React Native framework that are necessary in creating great mobile experiences.

ESP8266 Home Automation Projects. Leverage the power of this tiny WiFi chip to build exciting smart home projects

Catalin Batrinu, Constantin Tambrea

The ESP8266 is a low-cost yet powerful Wi-Fi chip that is becoming more popular at an alarming rate, and people have adopted it to create interesting projects.With this book, you will learn to create and program home automation projects using the ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip. You will learn how to build a thermostat to measure and adjust the temperature accordingly and how to build a security system using the ESP8266. Furthermore, you will design a complete home automation system from sensor to your own cloud. You will touch base on data monitoring, controlling appliances, and security aspects.By the end of the book, you will understand how to completely control and monitor your home from the cloud and from a mobile application. You will be familiar with the capabilities of the ESP8266 and will have successfully designed a complete ready-to-sell home automated system.

Mastering Immutable.js. Better JavaScript development using immutable data

Adam Boduch

Immutable.js is a JavaScript library that will improve the robustness and dependability of your larger JavaScript projects. All aspects of the Immutable.js framework are covered in this book, and common JavaScript situations are examined in a hands-on way so that you gain practical experience using Immutable.js that you can apply across your own JavaScript projects.The key to building robust JavaScript applications using immutability is to control how data flows through your application, and how the side-effects of these flows are managed. Many problems that are difficult to pinpoint in large codebases stem from data that’s been mutated where it shouldn’t have been. With immutable data, you rule out an entire class of bugs.Mastering Immutable.js takes a practical, hands-on approach throughout, and shows you the ins and outs of the Immutable.js framework so that you can confidently build successful and dependable JavaScript projects.

Beginning Data Science with Python and Jupyter. Use powerful industry-standard tools within Jupyter and the Python ecosystem to unlock new, actionable insights from your data

Alex Galea

Get to grips with the skills you need for entry-level data science in this hands-on Python and Jupyter course. You'll learn about some of the most commonly used libraries that are part of the Anaconda distribution, and then explore machine learning models with real datasets to give you the skills and exposure you need for the real world. We'll finish up by showing you how easy it can be to scrape and gather your own data from the open web, so that you can apply your new skills in an actionable context.

Beginning DevOps with Docker. Automate the deployment of your environment with the power of the Docker toolchain

Joseph Muli

Making sure that your application runs across different systems as intended is quickly becoming a standard development requirement. With Docker, you can ensure that what you build will behave the way you expect it to, regardless of where it's deployed. By guiding you through Docker from start to finish (from installation, to the Docker Registry, all the way through to working with Docker Swarms), we’ll equip you with the skills you need to migrate your workflow to Docker with complete confidence.

Expert Delphi. Robust and fast cross-platform application development

Pawel Glowacki

Delphi is the most powerful Object Pascal IDE and component library for cross-platform native app development. It enables building natively compiled, blazingly fast apps for all major platforms including Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Linux.If you want to build server-side applications, create web services, and have clear GUIs for your project, then this book is for you. The book begins with a basic primer on Delphi helping you get accustomed to the IDE and the Object Pascal language and will then quickly move on to advanced-level concepts. Through this book, we’ll help you understand the architecture of applications and will teach you the important concepts of the FireMonkey library, show you how to build server-side services, and enable you to interact with the Internet of Things. Towards the end, you will learn to integrate your app with various web services and deploy them. By the end of the book, you will be able to build powerful, cross-platform, native apps for iOS and Android with a single code base.

ESP8266 Internet of Things Cookbook. Over 50 recipes to help you master ESP8266 functionality

Marco Schwartz

The ESP8266 Wi-Fi Module is a self contained System on Chip (SOC) with an integrated TCP/IP protocol stack and can give any microcontroller access to your Wi-Fi network. It is capable of either hosting an application or offloading all Wi-Fi networking functions from another application processor.This book contains practical recipes that will help you master all ESP8266 functionalities. You will start by configuring and customizing the chip in line with your requirements. Then you will focus on core topics such as on-board processing, sensors, GPIOs, programming, networking, integration with external components, and so on. We will also teach you how to leverage Arduino using the ESP8266 and you'll learn about its libraries, file system, OTA updates, and so on. The book also provide recipes on web servers, testing, connecting with the cloud, and troubleshooting techniques. Programming aspects include MicroPython and how to leverage it to get started with the ESP8266. Towards the end, we will use these concepts and create an interesting project (IOT). By the end of the book, readers will be proficient enough to use the ESP8266 board efficiently.

Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications. Learn to build and deploy robust JavaScript applications using Cucumber, Mocha, Jenkins, Docker, and Kubernetes

Daniel Li

With the over-abundance of tools in the JavaScript ecosystem, it's easy to feel lost. Build tools, package managers, loaders, bundlers, linters, compilers, transpilers, typecheckers - how do you make sense of it all?In this book, we will build a simple API and React application from scratch. We begin by setting up our development environment using Git, yarn, Babel, and ESLint. Then, we will use Express, Elasticsearch and JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) to build a stateless API service. For the front-end, we will use React, Redux, and Webpack.A central theme in the book is maintaining code quality. As such, we will enforce a Test-Driven Development (TDD) process using Selenium, Cucumber, Mocha, Sinon, and Istanbul. As we progress through the book, the focus will shift towards automation and infrastructure. You will learn to work with Continuous Integration (CI) servers like Jenkins, deploying services inside Docker containers, and run them on Kubernetes.By following this book, you would gain the skills needed to build robust, production-ready applications.

Getting Started with Containerization. Reduce the operational burden on your system by automating and managing your containers

Gabriel N. Schenker, Hideto Saito, Hui-Chuan Chloe Lee, Ke-Jou Carol Hsu

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration platform for managing containers in a cluster environment. This Learning Path introduces you to the world of containerization, in addition to providing you with an overview of Docker fundamentals. As you progress, you will be able to understand how Kubernetes works with containers. Starting with creating Kubernetes clusters and running applications with proper authentication and authorization, you'll learn how to create high-availability Kubernetes clusters on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and also learn how to use kubeconfig to manage different clusters. Whether it is learning about Docker containers and Docker Compose, or building a continuous delivery pipeline for your application, this Learning Path will equip you with all the right tools and techniques to get started with containerization.By the end of this Learning Path, you will have gained hands-on experience of working with Docker containers and orchestrators, including SwarmKit and Kubernetes.This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products:• Kubernetes Cookbook - Second Edition by Hideto Saito, Hui-Chuan Chloe Lee, and Ke-Jou Carol Hsu• Learn Docker - Fundamentals of Docker 18.x by Gabriel N. Schenker

Extending OpenStack. Leverage extended OpenStack projects to implement containerization, deployment, and architecting robust cloud solutions

Omar Khedher

OpenStack is a very popular cloud computing platform that has enabled several organizations during the last few years to successfully implement their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms. This book will guide you through new features of the latest OpenStack releases and how to bring them into production straightaway in an agile way.It starts by showing you how to expand your current OpenStack setup and how to approach your next OpenStack Data Center generation deployment. You will discover how to extend your storage and network capacity and also take advantage of containerization technology such as Docker and Kubernetes in OpenStack. Additionally, you'll explore the power of big data as a Service terminology implemented in OpenStack by integrating the Sahara project. This book will teach you how to build Hadoop clusters and launch jobs in a very simple way. Then you'll automate and deploy applications on top of OpenStack. You will discover how to write your own plugin in the Murano project. The final part of the book will go through best practices for security such as identity, access management, and authentication exposed by Keystone in OpenStack. By the end of this book, you will be ready to extend and customize your private cloud based on your requirements.

Implementing Azure Solutions. Eliminate the pain point of implementation

Florian Klaffenbach, Oliver Michalski, Jan-Henrik Damaschke

Microsoft Azure has numerous effective solutions that shape the future of any business. However, the major challenge that architects and administrators face are implementing these solutions appropriately.Our book focuses on various implementation scenarios that will help overcome the challenge of implementing Azure’s solutions in a very efficient manner and will also help you to prepare for Microsoft Architect exam. You will not only learn how to secure a newly deployed Azure Active Directory but also get to know how Azure Active Directory Synchronization could be implemented. To maintain an isolated and secure environment so that you can run your virtual machines and applications, you will implement Azure networking services. Also to manage, access, and secure your confidential data, you will implement storage solutions. Toward the end, you will explore tips and tricks to secure your environment. By the end, you will be able to implement Azure solutions such as networking, storage, and cloud effectively.

Alexa Skills Projects. Build exciting projects with Amazon Alexa and integrate it with Internet of Things

Madhur Bhargava

Amazon Echo is a smart speaker developed by Amazon, which connects to Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service and is entirely controlled by voice commands. Amazon Echo is currently being used for a variety of purposes such as home automation, asking generic queries, and even ordering a cab or pizza.Alexa Skills Projects starts with a basic introduction to Amazon Alexa and Echo. You will then deep dive into Alexa Programmingconcepts such as Intents, Slots, Lambdas and maintaining your skill’s state using DynamoDB. You will get a clear understanding of how some of the most popular Alexa Skills work, and gain experience of working with real-world Amazon Echo applications. In the concluding chapters, you will explore the future of voice-enabled applications and their coverage with respect to the Internet of Things.By the end of the book, you will have learned to design Alexa Skills for specific purposes and interact with Amazon Echo to execute these skills.

R Data Analysis Projects. Build end to end analytics systems to get deeper insights from your data

Gopi Subramanian

R offers a large variety of packages and libraries for fast and accurate data analysis and visualization. As a result, it’s one of the most popularly used languages by data scientists and analysts, or anyone who wants to perform data analysis. This book will demonstrate how you can put to use your existing knowledge of data analysis in R to build highly efficient, end-to-end data analysis pipelines without any hassle.You’ll start by building a content-based recommendation system, followed by building a project on sentiment analysis with tweets. You’ll implement time-series modeling for anomaly detection, and understand cluster analysis of streaming data. You’ll work through projects on performing efficient market data research, building recommendation systems, and analyzing networks accurately, all provided with easy to follow codes. With the help of these real-world projects, you’ll get a better understanding of the challenges faced when building data analysis pipelines, and see how you can overcome them without compromising on the efficiency or accuracy of your systems. The book covers some popularly used R packages such as dplyr, ggplot2, RShiny, and others, and includes tips on using them effectively.By the end of this book, you’ll have a better understanding of data analysis with R, and be able to put your knowledge to practical use without any hassle.

Applied Network Security. Proven tactics to detect and defend against all kinds of network attack

Arthur Salmon, Michael McLafferty, Warun Levesque

Computer networks are increasing at an exponential rate and the most challenging factor organisations are currently facing is network security. Breaching a network is not considered an ingenious effort anymore, so it is very important to gain expertise in securing your network.The book begins by showing you how to identify malicious network behaviour and improve your wireless security. We will teach you what network sniffing is, the various tools associated with it, and how to scan for vulnerable wireless networks. Then we’ll show you how attackers hide the payloads and bypass the victim’s antivirus. Furthermore, we’ll teach you how to spoof IP / MAC address and perform an SQL injection attack and prevent it on your website. We will create an evil twin and demonstrate how to intercept network traffic. Later, you will get familiar with Shodan and Intrusion Detection and will explore the features and tools associated with it. Toward the end, we cover tools such as Yardstick, Ubertooth, Wifi Pineapple, and Alfa used for wireless penetration testing and auditing. This book will show the tools and platform to ethically hack your own network whether it is for your business or for your personal home Wi-Fi.

Mastering Reverse Engineering. Re-engineer your ethical hacking skills

Reginald Wong

If you want to analyze software in order to exploit its weaknesses and strengthen its defenses, then you should explore reverse engineering. Reverse Engineering is a hackerfriendly tool used to expose security flaws and questionable privacy practices.In this book, you will learn how to analyse software even without having access to its source code or design documents. You will start off by learning the low-level language used to communicate with the computer and then move on to covering reverse engineering techniques. Next, you will explore analysis techniques using real-world tools such as IDA Pro and x86dbg. As you progress through the chapters, you will walk through use cases encountered in reverse engineering, such as encryption and compression, used to obfuscate code, and how to to identify and overcome anti-debugging and anti-analysis tricks. Lastly, you will learn how to analyse other types of files that contain code.By the end of this book, you will have the confidence to perform reverse engineering.

Building Business Websites with Squarespace 7. Master the Squarespace platform to build professional websites that boost your businesses - Second Edition

Tiffanie Miko Coffey

Squarespace is a web-based tool that allows non-technical people to create and manage professional-looking websites quickly, without needing to write any code. It empowers business owners to take total control of their own websites, without needing to pay someone to design or maintain it.This book covers much more than just how to use Squarespace. It covers all aspects of creating a successful business website, from developing your brand identity, to writing and structuring content to match your target audience's needs, and dozens of other other valuable tips that will help your website shine. Most importantly, you'll learn the correct steps to follow in order to ensure your project is smooth and stress-free.The book starts by helping you plan your website project and gather all the raw materials you'll need. Next, you'll set up your account and become familiar with the terminology and tools that you'll be using. Once you've learned the basics of how the Squarespace interface, templates, and different page types operate, you will create the framework of your website, ready for you to insert content and functionality. Then, once all the core elements are in place, you'll apply the aesthetic fine-tuning needed to bring your website in line with your brand. After the aesthetics have been honed and all functions tested, you will launch your website and drive traffic to it, monitor it, and improve it.

Learn Arduino Prototyping in 10 days. Build it, test it, learn, try again!

Kallol Bosu Roy Choudhuri

This book is a quick, 10-day crash course that will help you become well acquaintedwith the Arduino platform. The primary focus is to empower you to use the Arduinoplatform by applying basic fundamental principles. You will be able to apply theseprinciples to build almost any type of physical device.The projects you will work through in this book are self-contained micro-controllerprojects, interfacing with single peripheral devices (such as sensors), buildingcompound devices (multiple devices in a single setup), prototyping standalonedevices (powered from independent power sources), working with actuators (such as DCmotors), interfacing with an AC-powered device, wireless devices (with Infrared,Radio Frequency and GSM techniques), and finally implementing the Internet of Things(using the ESP8266 series Wi-Fi chip with an IoT cloud platform).The first half of the book focuses on fundamental techniques and building basictypes of device, and the final few chapters will show you how to prototype wirelessdevices. By the end of this book, you will have become acquainted with the fundamentalprinciples in a pragmatic and scientific manner. You will also be confident enough totake up new device prototyping challenges.

Hands-On Robotics with JavaScript. Build robotic projects using Johnny-Five and control hardware with JavaScript and Raspberry Pi

Kassandra Perch

JavaScript has an effective set of frameworks and libraries that provide support for embedded device programming and the robotics ecosystem. You’ll be able to put your JavaScript knowledge to work with this practical robotics guide.The book starts by guiding you in setting up an environment to program robots with JavaScript and Rasberry Pi 3. You will build beginner-level projects, such as a line-following robot, and then upgrade your robotics skills with a series of projects that help you get to grips with the Johnny-Five library. As you progress, you’ll learn how you can improve your projects by enabling advanced hardware components and programming concepts. You’ll even build an advanced AI-enabled robot, connect its NodeBots to the internet, create a NodeBots Swarm, and explore Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT).By the end of this book, you will have enhanced your robot programming skills by building a range of simple to complex projects.

Practical AWS Networking. Build and manage complex networks using services such as Amazon VPC, Elastic Load Balancing, Direct Connect, and Amazon Route 53

Mitesh Soni

Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominates the public cloud market by a huge margin and continues to be the first choice for many organizations. Networking has been an area of focus for all the leading cloud service providers. AWS has a suite of network-related products which help in performing network related task on AWS.This book initially covers the basics of networking in AWS. Then we use AWS VPC to create an isolated virtual cloud for performing network-related tasks. We then provide an overview of AWS Direct Connect after taking a deep dive into scalability and load balancing using the auto scaling feature, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Route S3. Toward the end of the book, we cover troubleshooting tips and security best practices for your network. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience of working with network tasks on AWS.

Building Applications with Spring 5 and Kotlin. Build scalable and reactive applications with Spring combined with the productivity of Kotlin

Miloš Vasić

Kotlin is being used widely by developers because of its light weight, built-in null safety, and functional and reactive programming aspects. Kotlin shares the same pragmatic, innovative and opinionated mindset as Spring, so they work well together. Spring when combined with Kotlin helps you to reach a new level of productivity. This combination has helped developers to create Functional Applications using both the tools together. This book will teach you how to take advantage of these developments and build robust, scalable and reactive applications with ease. In this book, you will begin with an introduction to Spring and its setup with Kotlin. You will then dive into assessing the design considerations of your application. Then you will learn to use Spring (with Spring Boot) along with Kotlin to build a robust backend in a microservice architecture with a REST based collaboration, and leverage Project Reactor in your application. You’ll then learn how to integrate Spring Data and Spring Cloud to manage configurations for database interaction and cloud deployment. You’ll also learn to use Spring Security to beef up security of your application before testing it with the JUnit framework and then deploying it on a cloud platform like AWS.