Ensemble Machine Learning Cookbook. Over 35 practical recipes to explore ensemble machine learning techniques using Python

Dipayan Sarkar, Vijayalakshmi Natarajan

Ensemble modeling is an approach used to improve the performance of machine learning models. It combines two or more similar or dissimilar machine learning algorithms to deliver superior intellectual powers. This book will help you to implement popular machine learning algorithms to cover different paradigms of ensemble machine learning such as boosting, bagging, and stacking.The Ensemble Machine Learning Cookbook will start by getting you acquainted with the basics of ensemble techniques and exploratory data analysis. You'll then learn to implement tasks related to statistical and machine learning algorithms to understand the ensemble of multiple heterogeneous algorithms. It will also ensure that you don't miss out on key topics, such as like resampling methods. As you progress, you’ll get a better understanding of bagging, boosting, stacking, and working with the Random Forest algorithm using real-world examples. The book will highlight how these ensemble methods use multiple models to improve machine learning results, as compared to a single model. In the concluding chapters, you'll delve into advanced ensemble models using neural networks, natural language processing, and more. You’ll also be able to implement models such as fraud detection, text categorization, and sentiment analysis.By the end of this book, you'll be able to harness ensemble techniques and the working mechanisms of machine learning algorithms to build intelligent models using individual recipes.

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.

R Data Visualization Recipes. A cookbook with 65+ data visualization recipes for smarter decision-making

Vitor Bianchi Lanzetta

R is an open source language for data analysis and graphics that allows users to load various packages for effective and better data interpretation. Its popularity has soared in recent years because of its powerful capabilities when it comes to turning different kinds of data into intuitive visualization solutions.This book is an update to our earlier R data visualization cookbook with 100 percent fresh content and covering all the cutting edge R data visualization tools. This book is packed with practical recipes, designed to provide you with all the guidance needed to get to grips with data visualization using R. It starts off with the basics of ggplot2, ggvis, and plotly visualization packages, along with an introduction to creating maps and customizing them, before progressively taking you through various ggplot2 extensions, such as ggforce, ggrepel, and gganimate. Using real-world datasets, you will analyze and visualize your data as histograms, bar graphs, and scatterplots, and customize your plots with various themes and coloring options. The book also covers advanced visualization aspects such as creating interactive dashboards using ShinyBy the end of the book, you will be equipped with key techniques to create impressive data visualizations with professional efficiency and precision.

Mastering Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016. An advanced guide for effective Dynamics CRM customization and development

Deepesh Somani

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is the most trusted name in enterprise-level customer relationship management. The latest version of Dynamics CRM 2016 comes with some exciting extra features guaranteed to make your life easier with Dynamics CRM. This book provides a comprehensive coverage of Dynamics CRM 2016 and helps you make your tasks much simpler while elevating you to the level of an expert.The book starts with a brief overview of the functional features and then introduces the latest features of Dynamics CRM 2016. You will learn to create Word and Excel templates, using CRM data that will enable you to provide customized data analysis for your organization. You will understand how to utilize Dynamics CRM as an XRM Framework, gain a deep understanding about client-side scripting in Dynamics CRM, and learn creating client-side applications using JavaScript and Web API. We then introduce visual control frameworks for Dynamics CRM 2016 mobile and tablet applications. Business Process Flows, Business Rules, and their enhancements are introduced. By the end of this book, you will have mastered utilizing Dynamics CRM 2016 features through real-world scenarios.

Windows Server 2016 Administration Cookbook. Core infrastructure, IIS, Remote Desktop Services, Monitoring, and Group Policy

Jordan Krause

Windows Server 2016 is an operating system designed to run on servers. It supports enterprise-level data storage, communications, management, and applications. This book contains specially selected, detailed help on core, essential administrative tasks of Windows Server 2016.This book starts by helping you to navigate the interface of Windows Server 2016, and quickly shifts gears to implementing roles that are necessarily in any Microsoft-centric datacenter.This book will also help you leverage the web services platform built into Windows Server 2016, available to anyone who runs this latest and greatest Server operating system. Further, you will also learn to compose optimal Group Policies and monitor system performance and IP address management.This book will be a handy quick-reference guide for any Windows Server administrator, providing easy to read, step-by-step instructions for many common administrative tasks that will be part of any Server Administrator’s job description as they administer their Windows Server 2016 powered servers.The material in the book has been selected from the content of Packt's Windows Server 2016 Cookbook by Jordan Krause to provide a specific focus on key Windows Server administration tasks.

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.

SQL Server 2017 Integration Services Cookbook. Powerful ETL techniques to load and transform data from almost any source

Christian Cote, Dejan Sarka, David Peter Hansen, Matija Lah, ...

SQL Server Integration Services is a tool that facilitates data extraction, consolidation, and loading options (ETL), SQL Server coding enhancements, data warehousing, and customizations. With the help of the recipes in this book, you’ll gain complete hands-on experience of SSIS 2017 as well as the 2016 new features, design and development improvements including SCD, Tuning, and Customizations.At the start, you’ll learn to install and set up SSIS as well other SQL Server resources to make optimal use of this Business Intelligence tools. We’ll begin by taking you through the new features in SSIS 2016/2017 and implementing the necessary features to get a modern scalable ETL solution that fits the modern data warehouse. Through the course of chapters, you will learn how to design and build SSIS data warehouses packages using SQL Server Data Tools. Additionally, you’ll learn to develop SSIS packages designed to maintain a data warehouse using the Data Flow and other control flow tasks. You’ll also be demonstrated many recipes on cleansing data and how to get the end result after applying different transformations. Some real-world scenarios that you might face are also covered and how to handle various issues that you might face when designing your packages.At the end of this book, you’ll get to know all the key concepts to perform data integration and transformation. You’ll have explored on-premises Big Data integration processes to create a classic data warehouse, and will know how to extend the toolbox with custom tasks and transforms.

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.

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

D3.js Quick Start Guide. Create amazing, interactive visualizations in the browser with JavaScript

Matthew Huntington

D3.js is a JavaScript library that allows you to create graphs and data visualizations in the browser with HTML, SVG, and CSS. This book will take you from the basics of D3.js, so that you can create your own interactive visualizations, to creating the most common graphs that you will encounter as a developer, scientist, statistician, or data scientist.The book begins with an overview of SVG, the basis for creating two-dimensional graphics in the browser. Once the reader has a firm understanding of SVG, we will tackle the basics of how to use D3.js to connect data to our SVG elements. We will start with a scatter plot that maps run data to circles on a graph, and expand our scatter plot to make it interactive. You will see how you can easily allow the users of your graph to create, edit, and delete run data by simply dragging and clicking the graph. Next, we will explore creating a bar graph, using external data from a mock API.After that, we will explore animations and motion with a bar graph, and use various physics-based forces to create a force-directed graph. Finally, we will look at how to use GeoJSON data to create a map.

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.

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.

Learn Spring for Android Application Development. Build robust Android applications with Kotlin 1.3 and Spring 5

S. M. Mohi Us Sunnat, Igor Kucherenko

As the new official language for Android, Kotlin is attracting new as well as existing Android developers. As most developers are still working with Java and want to switch to Kotlin, they find a combination of these two appealing. This book addresses this interest by bringing together Spring, a widely used Java SE framework for building enterprise-grade applications, and Kotlin.Learn Spring for Android Application Development will guide you in leveraging some of the powerful modules of the Spring Framework to build lightweight and robust Android apps using Kotlin. You will work with various modules, such as Spring AOP, Dependency Injection, and Inversion of Control, to develop applications with better dependency management. You’ll also explore other modules of the Spring Framework, such as Spring MVC, Spring Boot, and Spring Security. Each chapter has practice exercises at the end for you to assess your learning.By the end of the book, you will be fully equipped to develop Android applications with Spring technologies.

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.

Mastering Elasticsearch 5.x. Master the intricacies of Elasticsearch 5 and use it to create flexible and scalable search solutions - Third Edition

Bharvi Dixit

Elasticsearch is a modern, fast, distributed, scalable, fault tolerant, and open source search and analytics engine. Elasticsearch leverages the capabilities of Apache Lucene, and provides a new level of control over how you can index and search even huge sets of data.This book will give you a brief recap of the basics and also introduce you to the new features of Elasticsearch 5. We will guide you through the intermediate and advanced functionalities of Elasticsearch, such as querying, indexing, searching, and modifying data. We’ll also explore advanced concepts, including aggregation, index control, sharding, replication, and clustering. We’ll show you the modules of monitoring and administration available in Elasticsearch, and will also cover backup and recovery. You will get an understanding of how you can scale your Elasticsearch cluster to contextualize it and improve its performance. We’ll also show you how you can create your own analysis plugin in Elasticsearch. By the end of the book, you will have all the knowledge necessary to master Elasticsearch and put it to efficient use.

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.