Systems Engineering Demystified. A practitioner's handbook for developing complex systems using a model-based approach

Jon Holt

Systems engineering helps us to understand, specify, and develop complex systems, and is applied across a wide set of disciplines. As systems and their associated problems become increasingly complex in this evermore connected world, the need for more rigorous, demonstrable, and repeatable techniques also increases.Written by Professor Jon Holt – an internationally recognized systems engineering expert – this book provides a blend of technical and business aspects you need to understand in order to develop successful systems. You'll start with systems engineering basics and understand the complexity, communication, and different stakeholders' views of the system. The book then covers essential aspects of model-based systems engineering, systems, life cycles, and processes, along with techniques to develop systems. Moving on, you'll explore system models and visualization techniques, focusing on the SysML, and discover how solutions can be defined by developing effective system design, verification, and validation techniques. The book concludes by taking you through key management processes and systems engineering best practices and guidelines.By the end of this systems engineering book, you'll be able to confidently apply modern model-based systems engineering techniques to your own systems and projects.

The Chief AI Officer's Handbook. Master AI leadership with strategies to innovate, overcome challenges, and drive business growth

Jarrod Anderson, Jeff Winter

Chief Artificial Intelligence Officers (CAIOs) are now imperative for businesses, enabling organizations to achieve strategic goals and unlock transformative opportunities through the power of AI. By building intelligent systems, training models to drive impactful decisions, and creating innovative applications, they empower organizations to thrive in an AI-driven world. Written by Jarrod Anderson, Chief AI Officer at SYRV.AI, this book bridges the gap between visionary leadership and practical execution.This handbook reimagines AI leadership for today’s fast-paced environment, leveraging predictive, deterministic, generative, and agentic AI to address complex challenges and foster innovation. It provides CAIOs with the strategies to develop transformative AI initiatives, build and lead elite teams, and adopt AI responsibly while maintaining compliance. From shaping impactful solutions to achieving measurable business outcomes, this guide offers a roadmap for making AI your organization’s competitive edge.By the end of this book, you’ll have the knowledge and tools to excel as a Chief AI Officer, driving innovation, strategic growth, and lasting success for your organization.

Learning Jupyter. Select, Share, Interact and Integrate with Jupyter Not

Dan Toomey

Jupyter Notebook is a web-based environment that enables interactive computing in notebook documents. It allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and explanatory text. The Jupyter Notebook system is extensively used in domains such as data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, machine learning, and much more.This book starts with a detailed overview of the Jupyter Notebook system and its installation in different environments. Next we’ll help you will learn to integrate Jupyter system with different programming languages such as R, Python, JavaScript, and Julia and explore the various versions and packages that are compatible with the Notebook system. Moving ahead, you master interactive widgets, namespaces, and working with Jupyter in a multiuser mode.Towards the end, you will use Jupyter with a big data set and will apply all the functionalities learned throughout the book.

Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles. Create impressive production-ready projects using one of the most powerful rendering engines - Fourth Edition

Arijan Belec

Blender is one of the most versatile tools in the 3D software industry, and with a growing audience and constantly expanding set of features, it has become more powerful, useful, and in demand than ever before. This updated fourth edition of Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles is an all-inclusive guide to procedural texturing, rendering, and designing materials in Blender, covering all aspects of the 3D texturing workflow.The book begins by introducing you to Blender’s material nodes and material property functions, and then helps you create photorealistic textures by understanding texture maps and mapping them to 3D models. As you advance, you’ll learn to design high-quality environments and lighting using HDRIs and Blender’s lighting options. By exploring, breaking down, and studying the underlying mechanics that allow you to develop these elements, you’ll create any material, texture, or environment and use it to improve your artwork and present them in a professional way. Finally, you’ll discover how to correctly set up scenes and render settings, and get to grips with the key elements of achieving realism.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a solid understanding of materials, textures, shading, lighting, rendering, and all the critical aspects of achieving the highest quality with your 3D artwork.

IBM SmartCloud Essentials. This book provides an overview of what modern cloud computing involves, and then focuses specifically on the most important features of the IBM SmartCloud portfolio. A crash course in implementing cloud computing for your organization

Edwin Schouten

IBM, the oldest technology company in the world, has a wide variety of powerful cloud services to offer from its IBM SmartCloud portfolio. Being able to differentiate them, and knowing how to use them efficiently gives you a competitive advantage over others.Starting with the basics of cloud computing, this guide covers the wide range of cloud components, services, and solutions in the IBM SmartCloud portfolio. Following on from this, you'll be introduced to the public , Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud service - IBM SmartCloud Enterprise; before peeking into the future of IBM cloud services. Using this book, you will discover the advantage of both traditional enterprise computing and public cloud computing.You will explore IBM's portfolio of cloud computing solutions ranging from infrastructure services (IaaS), to business services (BPaaS), and private to public cloud. You will be taken through a number of in-depth use-cases, examples, and hand-on exercises that will help you to take advantage of infrastructure as a service solution IBM SmartCloud Enterprise quickly and easily.You will learn everything you need to know about the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, including how to take advantage of cloud computing within your organization.

Building Android Games with Cocos2d-x. Learn to create engaging and spectacular games for Android using Cocos2d-x

Raydelto Hernadez, Raydelto Hernandez

NumPy Cookbook. If you’re a Python developer with basic NumPy skills, the 70+ recipes in this brilliant cookbook will boost your skills in no time. Learn to raise productivity levels and code faster and cleaner with the open source mathematical library

Ivan Idris, NumPy

Today's world of science and technology is all about speed and flexibility. When it comes to scientific computing, NumPy is on the top of the list. NumPy will give you both speed and high productivity.NumPy Cookbook will teach you all about NumPy, a leading scientific computing library. NumPy replaces a lot of the functionality of Matlab and Mathematica, but in contrast to those products, it is free and open source.Numpy Cookbook will teach you to write readable, efficient, and fast code that is as close to the language of Mathematics as much as possible with the cutting edge open source NumPy software library.You will learn about installing and using NumPy and related concepts. At the end of the book, we will explore related scientific computing projects.This book will give you a solid foundation in NumPy arrays and universal functions. You will also learn about plotting with Matplotlib and the related SciPy project through examples.NumPy Cookbook will help you to be productive with NumPy and write clean and fast code.

Data Augmentation with Python. Enhance deep learning accuracy with data augmentation methods for image, text, audio, and tabular data

Duc Haba

Data is paramount in AI projects, especially for deep learning and generative AI, as forecasting accuracy relies on input datasets being robust. Acquiring additional data through traditional methods can be challenging, expensive, and impractical, and data augmentation offers an economical option to extend the dataset.The book teaches you over 20 geometric, photometric, and random erasing augmentation methods using seven real-world datasets for image classification and segmentation. You’ll also review eight image augmentation open source libraries, write object-oriented programming (OOP) wrapper functions in Python Notebooks, view color image augmentation effects, analyze safe levels and biases, as well as explore fun facts and take on fun challenges. As you advance, you’ll discover over 20 character and word techniques for text augmentation using two real-world datasets and excerpts from four classic books. The chapter on advanced text augmentation uses machine learning to extend the text dataset, such as Transformer, Word2vec, BERT, GPT-2, and others. While chapters on audio and tabular data have real-world data, open source libraries, amazing custom plots, and Python Notebook, along with fun facts and challenges.By the end of this book, you will be proficient in image, text, audio, and tabular data augmentation techniques.

Agile Technical Practices Distilled. A learning journey in technical practices and principles of software design

Pedro M. Santos, Marco Consolaro, Alessandro Di Gioia

The number of popular technical practices has grown exponentially in the last few years. Learning the common fundamental software development practices can help you become a better programmer. This book uses the term Agile as a wide umbrella and covers Agile principles and practices, as well as most methodologies associated with it. You’ll begin by discovering how driver-navigator, chess clock, and other techniques used in the pair programming approach introduce discipline while writing code. You’ll then learn to safely change the design of your code using refactoring. While learning these techniques, you’ll also explore various best practices to write efficient tests. The concluding chapters of the book delve deep into the SOLID principles - the five design principles that you can use to make your software more understandable, flexible and maintainable. By the end of the book, you will have discovered new ideas for improving your software design skills, the relationship within your team, and the way your business works.

Journey to Become a Google Cloud Machine Learning Engineer. Build the mind and hand of a Google Certified ML professional

Logan Song

This book aims to provide a study guide to learn and master machine learning in Google Cloud: to build a broad and strong knowledge base, train hands-on skills, and get certified as a Google Cloud Machine Learning Engineer.The book is for someone who has the basic Google Cloud Platform (GCP) knowledge and skills, and basic Python programming skills, and wants to learn machine learning in GCP to take their next step toward becoming a Google Cloud Certified Machine Learning professional.The book starts by laying the foundations of Google Cloud Platform and Python programming, followed the by building blocks of machine learning, then focusing on machine learning in Google Cloud, and finally ends the studying for the Google Cloud Machine Learning certification by integrating all the knowledge and skills together.The book is based on the graduate courses the author has been teaching at the University of Texas at Dallas. When going through the chapters, the reader is expected to study the concepts, complete the exercises, understand and practice the labs in the appendices, and study each exam question thoroughly. Then, at the end of the learning journey, you can expect to harvest the knowledge, skills, and a certificate.

Building Forms with Vue.js. Patterns for building and scaling complex forms with great UX

Marina Mosti

Almost every web application and site out there handles user input in one way or another, from registration forms and log-in handling to registration and landing pages. Building Forms with Vue.js follows a step-by-step approach to help you create an efficient user interface (UI) and seamless user experience (UX) by building quick and easy-to-use forms.You’ll get off to a steady start by setting up the demo project. Next, you’ll get to grips with component composition from creating reusable form components through to implementing the custom input components. To further help you develop a convenient user input experience, the book will show you how to enhance custom inputs with v-mask. As you progress, you’ll get up to speed with using Vuelidate and Vuex to effectively integrate your forms. You’ll learn how to create forms that use global state, reactive instant user input validation and input masking, along with ensuring that they are completely schema-driven and connected to your application’s API. Every chapter builds on the concepts learned in the previous chapter, while also allowing you to skip ahead to the topics you’re most interested in.By the end of this book, you will have gained the skills you need to transform even the simplest form into a crafted user and developer experience with Vue.

Understanding TCP/IP. A clear and comprehensive guide to TCP/IP protocols

Libor Dost?É?íÂ!°lek, Alena Kabelov?É?íÂ!°, CP Books a.s.

This book covers in detail the Open System Interconnection (OSI) reference model and the TCP/IP protocols that operate that different layers. Its coverage includes various application protocols. The authors explain in an easy-to-read style networking concepts and protocols, with examples that make the book a practical guide in addition to its coverage of theory.

Game Development Projects with Unreal Engine. Learn to build your first games and bring your ideas to life using UE4 and C++

Hammad Fozi, Gonçalo Marques, David Pereira, Devin Sherry

Game development can be both a creatively fulfilling hobby and a full-time career path. It's also an exciting way to improve your C++ skills and apply them in engaging and challenging projects.Game Development Projects with Unreal Engine starts with the basic skills you'll need to get started as a game developer. The fundamentals of game design will be explained clearly and demonstrated practically with realistic exercises. You’ll then apply what you’ve learned with challenging activities.The book starts with an introduction to the Unreal Editor and key concepts such as actors, blueprints, animations, inheritance, and player input. You'll then move on to the first of three projects: building a dodgeball game. In this project, you'll explore line traces, collisions, projectiles, user interface, and sound effects, combining these concepts to showcase your new skills.You'll then move on to the second project; a side-scroller game, where you'll implement concepts including animation blending, enemy AI, spawning objects, and collectibles. The final project is an FPS game, where you will cover the key concepts behind creating a multiplayer environment.By the end of this Unreal Engine 4 game development book, you'll have the confidence and knowledge to get started on your own creative UE4 projects and bring your ideas to life.

Introduction to DevOps with Kubernetes. Build scalable cloud-native applications using DevOps patterns created with Kubernetes

Onur Yilmaz, Süleyman Akba?ü

Kubernetes and DevOps are the two pillars that can keep your business at the top by ensuring high performance of your IT infrastructure. Introduction to DevOps with Kubernetes will help you develop the skills you need to improve your DevOps with the power of Kubernetes. The book begins with an overview of Kubernetes primitives and DevOps concepts. You'll understand how Kubernetes can assist you with overcoming a wide range of real-world operation challenges. You will get to grips with creating and upgrading a cluster, and then learn how to deploy, update, and scale an application on Kubernetes. As you advance through the chapters, you’ll be able to monitor an application by setting up a pod failure alert on Prometheus. The book will also guide you in configuring Alertmanager to send alerts to the Slack channel and trace down a problem on the application using kubectl commands. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to manage the lifecycle of simple to complex applications on Kubernetes with confidence.

The Statistics and Calculus with Python Workshop. A comprehensive introduction to mathematics in Python for artificial intelligence applications

Peter Farrell, Alvaro Fuentes, Ajinkya Sudhir Kolhe, Quan Nguyen, ...

Are you looking to start developing artificial intelligence applications? Do you need a refresher on key mathematical concepts? Full of engaging practical exercises, The Statistics and Calculus with Python Workshop will show you how to apply your understanding of advanced mathematics in the context of Python.The book begins by giving you a high-level overview of the libraries you'll use while performing statistics with Python. As you progress, you'll perform various mathematical tasks using the Python programming language, such as solving algebraic functions with Python starting with basic functions, and then working through transformations and solving equations. Later chapters in the book will cover statistics and calculus concepts and how to use them to solve problems and gain useful insights. Finally, you'll study differential equations with an emphasis on numerical methods and learn about algorithms that directly calculate values of functions.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to apply essential statistics and calculus concepts to develop robust Python applications that solve business challenges.

Deploying Node.js. Learn how to build, test, deploy, monitor, and maintain your Node.js applications at scale

Sandro Pasquali

Software Architecture with Kotlin. Combine various architectural styles to create sustainable and scalable software solutions

Jason (Tsz Shun) Chow

Software Architecture with Kotlin explores the various styles of software architecture with a focus on using the Kotlin programming language. The author draws on their 20+ years of industry experience in developing large-scale enterprise distributed systems to help you grasp the principles, practices, and patterns that shape the architectural landscape of modern software systems.The book establishes a strong foundation in software architecture, explaining key concepts such as architectural qualities and principles, before teaching you how architectural decisions impact the quality of a system, such as scalability, reliability, and extendability. The chapters address modern architecture topics such as microservices, serverless, and event-driven architectures, providing insights into the challenges and trade-offs involved in adopting these architectural styles. You’ll also discover practical tools that’ll help you make informed decisions and mitigate risks. All architectural patterns in this book are demonstrated using Kotlin.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained practical expertise by using real-world examples, along with a solid understanding of Kotlin, to become a more proficient and impactful software architect.

Minimal CMake. Learn the best bits of CMake to create and share your own libraries and applications

Tom Hulton-Harrop

Minimal CMake guides you through creating a CMake project one step at a time. The book utilizes the author's unique expertise in game and engine development to craft compelling examples of how CMake can be used to build complex software. The chapters introduce concepts gradually, each one building on the last. Throughout the course of the book, you will progress from a simple console application all the way through to a full windowed app.The book will help you build a strong foundation in CMake that will translate to future projects. You'll learn how to integrate existing software libraries to enhance your app's functionality, how to build reusable libraries to share with others, and how to manage developing for multiple platforms simultaneously, including macOS, Windows, and Linux. You'll also find out how CMake facilitates testing and how to package your application ready for distribution.The book aims to not overwhelm you with everything there is to know about CMake. Instead, it focuses on the most relevant and important parts that will help you become productive quickly.By the end of this book, you will be a confident CMake user and will have gained the skills and experience to build and share your own libraries and applications.

Mastering AWS CloudFormation. Plan, develop, and deploy your cloud infrastructure effectively using AWS CloudFormation

Karen Tovmasyan

DevOps and the cloud revolution have forced software engineers and operations teams to rethink how to manage infrastructures. With this AWS book, you'll understand how you can use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to simplify IT operations and manage the modern cloud infrastructure effectively with AWS CloudFormation.This comprehensive guide will help you explore AWS CloudFormation from template structures through to developing complex and reusable infrastructure stacks. You'll then delve into validating templates, deploying stacks, and handling deployment failures. The book will also show you how to leverage AWS CodeBuild and CodePipeline to automate resource delivery and apply continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices to the stack. As you advance, you'll learn how to generate templates on the fly using macros and create resources outside AWS with custom resources. Finally, you'll improve the way you manage the modern cloud in AWS by extending CloudFormation using AWS serverless application model (SAM) and AWS cloud development kit (CDK).By the end of this book, you'll have mastered all the major AWS CloudFormation concepts and be able to simplify infrastructure management.

WordPress Search Engine Optimization. A complete guide to dominating search engines with your WordPress site

Michael David, Michael David

WordPress is a powerful platform for creating feature-rich and attractive websites but, with a little extra tweaking and effort, your WordPress site can dominate search engines and bring thousands of new customers to your business.WordPress Search Engine Optimization will show you the secrets that professional SEO companies use to take websites to the top of search results. You'll take your WordPress site to the next level; you'll brush aside even the stiffest competition with the advanced tutorials in this book.

Visual Studio 2013 and .NET 4.5 Expert Cookbook. Over 30 recipes to successfully mix the powerful capabilities of Visual Studio 2013 with .NET 4.5

Abhishek Sur, Abhishek Sur

Active Machine Learning with Python. Refine and elevate data quality over quantity with active learning

Margaux Masson-Forsythe

Building accurate machine learning models requires quality data—lots of it. However, for most teams, assembling massive datasets is time-consuming, expensive, or downright impossible. Led by Margaux Masson-Forsythe, a seasoned ML engineer and advocate for surgical data science and climate AI advancements, this hands-on guide to active machine learning demonstrates how to train robust models with just a fraction of the data using Python's powerful active learning tools.You’ll master the fundamental techniques of active learning, such as membership query synthesis, stream-based sampling, and pool-based sampling and gain insights for designing and implementing active learning algorithms with query strategy and Human-in-the-Loop frameworks. Exploring various active machine learning techniques, you’ll learn how to enhance the performance of computer vision models like image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation and delve into a machine AL method for selecting the most informative frames for labeling large videos, addressing duplicated data. You’ll also assess the effectiveness and efficiency of active machine learning systems through performance evaluation.By the end of the book, you’ll be able to enhance your active learning projects by leveraging Python libraries, frameworks, and commonly used tools.

R for Data Science Cookbook. Over 100 hands-on recipes to effectively solve real-world data problems using the most popular R packages and techniques

Yu-Wei, Chiu (David Chiu)

This cookbook offers a range of data analysis samples in simple and straightforward R code, providing step-by-step resources and time-saving methods to help you solve data problems efficiently.The first section deals with how to create R functions to avoid the unnecessary duplication of code. You will learn how to prepare, process, and perform sophisticated ETL for heterogeneous data sources with R packages. An example of data manipulation is provided, illustrating how to use the “dplyr” and “data.table” packages to efficiently process larger data structures. We also focus on “ggplot2” and show you how to create advanced figures for data exploration.In addition, you will learn how to build an interactive report using the “ggvis” package. Later chapters offer insight into time series analysis on financial data, while there is detailed information on the hot topic of machine learning, including data classification, regression, clustering, association rule mining, and dimension reduction.By the end of this book, you will understand how to resolve issues and will be able to comfortably offer solutions to problems encountered while performing data analysis.

Yii Project Blueprints. From conception to production, learn how to develop real-world applications with the Yii framework

Charles R. Portwood ll