Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine. The faster way to build games using UE4 Blueprints - Second Edition

Marcos Romero, Brenden Sewell

Blueprints is the visual scripting system in Unreal Engine that enables programmers to create baseline systems and can be extended by designers.This book helps you explore all the features of the Blueprint Editor and guides you through using Variables, Macros, and Functions. You’ll also learn about object-oriented programming (OOP) and discover the Gameplay Framework. In addition to this, you’ll learn how Blueprint Communication allows one Blueprint to access information from another Blueprint. Later chapters will focus on building a fully functional game using a step-by-step approach. You’ll start with a basic first-person shooter (FPS) template, and each chapter will build on the prototype to create an increasingly complex and robust game experience. You’ll then progress from creating basic shooting mechanics to more complex systems, such as user interface elements and intelligent enemy behavior. The skills you will develop using Blueprints can also be employed in other gaming genres. In the concluding chapters, the book demonstrates how to use arrays, maps, enums, and vector operations. Finally, you’ll learn how to build a basic VR game.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to build a fully functional game and will have the skills required to develop an entertaining experience for your audience.

Unity 2017 Game AI programming. Leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence to program smart entities for your games - Third Edition

Raymundo Barrera

Unity 2017 provides game and app developers with a variety of tools to implement Artificial Intelligence. Leveraging these tools via Unity's API or built-in features allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating your game's worlds and characters. This third edition with Unity will help you break down Artificial Intelligence into simple concepts to give you a fundamental understanding of the topic to build upon. Using a variety of examples, the book then takes those concepts and walks you through actual implementations designed to highlight key concepts, and features related to game AI in Unity 5. Further on you will learn to distinguish the state machine pattern and implement one of your own. This is followed by learning how to implement a basic sensory system for your AI agent and coupling it with a Finite State Machine (FSM).Next you'll learn how to use Unity's built-in NavMesh feature and implement your own A* pathfinding system. You will then learn how to implement simple flocks and crowd's dynamics, key AI concepts. Moving on, you will learn how to implement a behavior tree through a game-focused example. Lastly, you'll combine fuzzy logic concepts with state machines and apply all the concepts in the book to build a simple tank game.

Blender 3D: Designing Objects. Click here to enter text

Romain Caudron, Pierre-Armand Nicq, Enrico Valenza

Blender is a powerful, stable tool with an integral workflow that will allow you to understand 3D creation with ease. With its integrated game engine and use of the Python language, it is an efficient choice for many productions, including 3D animated or live action films, architecture, research, and even game creation. Blender has an active community that contributes to expanding its functionalities. Today, it is used in many professional products and by many companies.Throughout Blender for Designers, you will create many types of complete projects using a step-by-step approach. Start by getting to know the modeling tools available in Blender to create a 3D robot toy, and discover more advanced techniques such as sculpting and retopology by creating an alien character. Move on in the second module to engage with the workflow used to create characters. Run through the process from modeling to the rendering stages, using the tools of the latest official release of Blender.The last module will teach you how to utilize the power of the Blender series to create a wide variety of materials, textures, and effects using the Cycles rendering engine. You will learn about node-based shader creation, and master Cycles through step-by-step, recipe-based advice. Start small by rendering the textures of stones and water, then scale things up to massive landscapes of mountains and oceans. This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products:•Blender 3D By Example By Romain Caudron and Pierre-Armand Nicq•Blender 3D Cookbook By Enrico Valenza•Blender Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook - Third Edition By Enrico Valenza

World of Warcraft Gold Strategy Guide. The comprehensive guide to making gold in World of Warcraft, packed with the latest tips and strategies, designed to make you millions

Eric Gilmour, Eric Dekker

World of Warcraft provides an immersive gaming experience with an exciting new world to explore. In this world (of Warcraft), players use gold to improve their characters and buy exciting items such as armor, vanity items, pets, mounts, and so much more. WoW gold not only helps with levelling up, but also helps the player gain respect in the WoW community.World of Warcraft Gold Strategy Guide will show you the most effective ways to make gold in World of Warcraft. It includes detailed examples and instructions that will set you up to efficiently make plentiful amounts of gold both now and in future expansions.World of Warcraft Gold Strategy Guide will arm you with all the latest strategies to become a World of Warcraft gold tycoon.Start by setting up your accounts for optimal gold making and progress through to advanced market techniques. You will learn to maintain thousands of auctions per day, master add-ons to reduce time spent making gold and increase time spent playing, and set yourself up to obtain anything you want in game.The World of Warcraft Gold Strategy Guide teaches readers how to go from rags to riches.

Social Networking in Recruitment. Build your social networking expertise to give yourself a cost-effective advantage in the hiring market with this book and

Amanda Belton

Data Engineering with Apache Spark, Delta Lake, and Lakehouse. Create scalable pipelines that ingest, curate, and aggregate complex data in a timely and secure way

Manoj Kukreja, Danil Zburivsky

In the world of ever-changing data and schemas, it is important to build data pipelines that can auto-adjust to changes. This book will help you build scalable data platforms that managers, data scientists, and data analysts can rely on.Starting with an introduction to data engineering, along with its key concepts and architectures, this book will show you how to use Microsoft Azure Cloud services effectively for data engineering. You'll cover data lake design patterns and the different stages through which the data needs to flow in a typical data lake. Once you've explored the main features of Delta Lake to build data lakes with fast performance and governance in mind, you'll advance to implementing the lambda architecture using Delta Lake. Packed with practical examples and code snippets, this book takes you through real-world examples based on production scenarios faced by the author in his 10 years of experience working with big data. Finally, you'll cover data lake deployment strategies that play an important role in provisioning the cloud resources and deploying the data pipelines in a repeatable and continuous way.By the end of this data engineering book, you'll know how to effectively deal with ever-changing data and create scalable data pipelines to streamline data science, ML, and artificial intelligence (AI) tasks.

Web Development with Julia and Genie. A hands-on guide to high-performance server-side web development with the Julia programming language

Ivo Balbaert, Adrian Salceanu, Logan Kilpatrick

Julia’s high-performance and scalability characteristics and its extensive number of packages for visualizing data make it an excellent fit for developing web apps, web services, and web dashboards. The two parts of this book provide complete coverage to build your skills in web development.First, you'll refresh your knowledge of the main concepts in Julia that will further be used in web development. Then, you’ll use Julia’s standard web packages and examine how the building blocks of the web such as TCP-IP, web sockets, HTTP protocol, and so on are implemented in Julia’s standard library. Each topic is discussed and developed into code that you can apply in new projects, from static websites to dashboards. You’ll also understand how to choose the right Julia framework for a project. The second part of the book talks about the Genie framework. You’ll learn how to build a traditional to do app following the MVC design pattern. Next, you’ll add a REST API to this project, including testing and documentation. Later, you’ll explore the various ways of deploying an app in production, including authentication functionality. Finally, you’ll work on an interactive data dashboard, making various chart types and filters.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build interactive web solutions on a large scale with a Julia-based web framework.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Troubleshooting Guide. Identify, capture and resolve common issues faced by Red Hat Enterprise Linux administrators using best practices and advanced troubleshooting techniques

Benjamin Cane

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an operating system that allows you to modernize your infrastructure, boost efficiency through virtualization, and finally prepare your data center for an open, hybrid cloud IT architecture. It provides the stability to take on today's challenges and the flexibility to adapt to tomorrow's demands.In this book, you begin with simple troubleshooting best practices and get an overview of the Linux commands used for troubleshooting. The book will cover the troubleshooting methods for web applications and services such as Apache and MySQL. Then, you will learn to identify system performance bottlenecks and troubleshoot network issues; all while learning about vital troubleshooting steps such as understanding the problem statement, establishing a hypothesis, and understanding trial, error, and documentation. Next, the book will show you how to capture and analyze network traffic, use advanced system troubleshooting tools such as strace, tcpdump & dmesg, and discover common issues with system defaults.Finally, the book will take you through a detailed root cause analysis of an unexpected reboot where you will learnto recover a downed system.

Azure DevOps Explained. Get started with Azure DevOps and develop your DevOps practices

Sjoukje Zaal, Stefano Demiliani, Amit Malik

Developing applications for the cloud involves changing development methodologies and procedures. Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes are a must today, but are often difficult to implement and adopt. Azure DevOps is a Microsoft Azure cloud service that enhances your application development life cycle and enables DevOps capabilities.Starting with a comprehensive product overview, this book helps you to understand Azure DevOps and apply DevOps techniques to your development projects. You'll find out how to adopt DevOps techniques for your development processes by using built-in Azure DevOps tools. Throughout the course of this book, you'll also discover how to manage a project with the help of project management techniques such as Agile and Scrum, and then progress toward development aspects such as source code management, build pipelines, code testing and artifacts, release pipelines, and GitHub integration. As you learn how to implement DevOps practices, this book will also provide you with real-world examples and scenarios of DevOps adoption.By the end of this DevOps book, you will have learned how to adopt and implement Azure DevOps features in your real-world development processes.

Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 Cookbook. Click here to enter text

Mark Polino, Ian Grieve

The latest release of Dynamics GP 2016 offers a powerful, adaptable, and cloud enabled enterprise accounting software solution. The new version has experienced changes in serviced-based architecture, workflow, existing functionalities, and the introduction of plenty of new features. This book will help you get the most out of Dynamics GP quickly and effectively. This book picks up where implementation training leaves off. Whether you are new or experienced, you will find useful recipes to improve the way you use and work with Dynamics GP. The book starts with recipes designed to enhance the usefulness of Microsoft Dynamics GP by personalizing the look and feel of the application. Most of the recipes are designed to give you tips for a typical installation of Dynamics GP, including core financials and distribution modules. The book then moves through recipes that include automating Dynamics GP to allow users or administrators to focus on value adding tasks, connecting Dynamics GP to Microsoft Office, exposing hidden features in Dynamics GP, PowerBI, and much more!

Spring: Developing Java Applications for the Enterprise. Build robust applications and microservices with Spring Framework, Spring Boot, and Spring Cloud

Ravi Kant Soni, Rajesh R V, Amuthan Ganeshan

This carefully designed course aims to get you started with Spring, the most widely adopted Java framework, and then goes on to more advanced topics such as building microservices using Spring Boot within Spring. With additional coverage of popular web frameworks such as Struts, WebWork, Java Server Faces, Tapestry, Docker, and Mesos, you'll have all the skills and expertise you need to build great applications. Starting with the Spring Framework architecture and setting up the key components of the Spring Application Development Environment, you will learn how to configure Spring Container and manage Spring beans using XML and Annotation. Next, you will delve into Spring MVC, which will help you build flexible and loosely coupled web applications. You'll also get to grips with testing applications for reliability. Moving on, this course will help you implement the microservice architecture in Spring Framework, Spring Boot, and Spring Cloud. Written to the latest specifications of Spring, this book will help you build modern, Internet-scale Java applications in no time.This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products:? Learning Spring Application Development by Ravi Kant Soni? Spring MVC Beginner's Guide - Second Edition by Amuthan Ganeshan? Spring Microservices by Rajesh RV

Designing and Implementing Microsoft Azure Networking Solutions. Exam Ref AZ-700 preparation guide

David Okeyode

Designing and Implementing Microsoft Azure Networking Solutions is a comprehensive guide that covers every aspect of the AZ-700 exam to help you fully prepare to take the certification exam.Packed with essential information, this book is a valuable resource for Azure cloud professionals, helping you build practical skills to design and implement name resolution, VNet routing, cross-VNet connectivity, and hybrid network connectivity using the VPN Gateway and the ExpressRoute Gateway. It provides step-by-step instructions to design and implement an Azure Virtual WAN architecture for enterprise use cases.Additionally, the book offers detailed guidance on network security design and implementation, application delivery services, private platform service connectivity, and monitoring networks in Azure. Throughout the book, you’ll find hands-on labs carefully integrated to align with the exam objectives of the Azure Network Engineer certification (AZ-700), complemented by practice questions at the end of each chapter, allowing you to test your knowledge.By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the fundamentals of Azure networking and be ready to take the AZ-700 exam.

Mastering JavaScript Design Patterns. Write reliable code to create powerful applications by mastering advanced JavaScript design patterns - Second Edition

Simon Timms

With the recent release of ES-2015, there are several new object-oriented features and functions introduced in JavaScript. These new features enhance the capabilities of JavaScript to utilize design patterns and software design methodologies to write powerful code.Through this book, you will explore how design patterns can help you improve and organize your JavaScript code. You’ll get to grips with creational, structural and behavioral patterns as you discover how to put them to work in different scenarios. Then, you'll get a deeper look at patterns used in functional programming, as well as model view patterns and patterns to build web applications. This updated edition will also delve into reactive design patterns and microservices as they are a growing phenomenon in the world of web development. You will also find patterns to improve the testability of your code using mock objects, mocking frameworks, and monkey patching. We’ll also show you some advanced patterns including dependency injection and live post processing.By the end of the book, you'll be saved of a lot of trial and error and developmental headaches, and you will be on the road to becoming a JavaScript expert.

ZBrush 4 Sculpting for Games: Beginner's Guide. Sculpt machines, environments, and creatures for your game development projects

Manuel Scherer

ZBrush is a fantastic tool for creating models for use in computer games. Using a wide range of powerful tools you can create models for vehicles, props, environments, and characters.This book makes creating game art in ZBrush fast and easy. It covers everything you need to create models of all kinds for your game projects, even if you've never used ZBrush before.Built around four complete ZBrush projects, the book gives you everything you need to sculpt props, vehicles, and creatures in ZBrush. You'll start by creating a spooky tree model, mastering the sculpting, texturing, and decoration skills that are essential for all ZBrush topics. Next you'll move to man-made objects with a sci-fi drone. Next you'll see how to sculpt monsters and other creatures, deal with cloth and other soft materials, and prepare the model to become an animated, controllable character in a game. The final project returns to machines, building a complete, detailed spaceship for use in your sci-fi games.

Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g R2: Getting Started 2011. Extract, Transform, and Load data to build a dynamic, operational data warehouse

Bob Griesemer, Robert E Griesemer

In today's economy, businesses and IT professionals cannot afford to lag behind the latest technologies. Data warehousing is a critical area to the success of many enterprises, and Oracle Warehouse Builder is a powerful tool for building data warehouses. It comes free with the latest version of the Oracle database.Written in an accessible, informative, and focused manner, this book will teach you to use Oracle Warehouse Builder to build your data warehouse. Covering warehouse design, the import of source data, the ETL cycle and more, this book will have you up and running in next to no time.This book will walk you through the complete process of planning, building, and deploying a data warehouse using Oracle Warehouse Builder. By the book's end, you will have built your own data warehouse from scratch.Starting with the installation of the Oracle Database and Warehouse Builder software, this book then covers the analysis of source data, designing a data warehouse, and extracting, transforming, and loading data from the source system into the data warehouse. You'll follow the whole process with detailed screenshots of key steps along the way that have all been updated for the new Fusion Client Platform interface in 11gR2, alongside numerous tips and hints not covered by the official documentation. You’ll finish up with a brand new chapter on code templates where you’ll implement a complete mapping using JDBC connectivity and code template mappings.

Embedded Linux Development with Yocto Project. Develop fascinating Linux-based projects using the groundbreaking Yocto Project tools

Otavio Salvador, Otavio R Salvador, Daiane Angolini

Unity Game Optimization. Enhance and extend the performance of all aspects of your Unity games - Third Edition

Dr. Davide Aversa, Chris Dickinson

Unity engine comes with a great set of features to help you build high-performance games. This Unity book is your guide to optimizing various aspects of your game development, from game characters and scripts, right through to animations.You’ll explore techniques for writing better game scripts and learn how to optimize a game using Unity technologies such as ECS and the Burst compiler. The book will also help you manage third-party tooling used with the Unity ecosystem. You’ll also focus on the problems in the performance of large games and virtual reality (VR) projects in Unity, gaining insights into detecting performance issues and performing root cause analysis. As you progress, you’ll discover best practices for your Unity C# script code and get to grips with usage patterns. Later, you’ll be able to optimize audio resources and texture files, along with effectively storing and using resource files. You’ll then delve into the Rendering Pipeline and learn how to identify performance problems in the pipeline. In addition to this, you’ll learn how to optimize the memory and processing unit of Unity. Finally, you’ll cover tips and tricks used by Unity professionals to improve the project workflow.By the end of this book, you’ll have developed the skills you need to build interactive games using Unity and its components.

Machine Learning Engineering on AWS. Build, scale, and secure machine learning systems and MLOps pipelines in production

Joshua Arvin Lat

There is a growing need for professionals with experience in working on machine learning (ML) engineering requirements as well as those with knowledge of automating complex MLOps pipelines in the cloud. This book explores a variety of AWS services, such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, AWS Glue, AWS Lambda, Amazon Redshift, and AWS Lake Formation, which ML practitioners can leverage to meet various data engineering and ML engineering requirements in production.This machine learning book covers the essential concepts as well as step-by-step instructions that are designed to help you get a solid understanding of how to manage and secure ML workloads in the cloud. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll discover how to use several container and serverless solutions when training and deploying TensorFlow and PyTorch deep learning models on AWS. You’ll also delve into proven cost optimization techniques as well as data privacy and model privacy preservation strategies in detail as you explore best practices when using each AWS.By the end of this AWS book, you'll be able to build, scale, and secure your own ML systems and pipelines, which will give you the experience and confidence needed to architect custom solutions using a variety of AWS services for ML engineering requirements.

Java EE 7 Development with NetBeans 8. Develop professional enterprise Java EE applications quickly and easily with this popular IDE

David R Heffelfinger

Less Web Development Essentials. Leverage the features of Less to write better, reusable, and maintainable CSS code

Bass Jobsen

Leap Motion Development Essentials. Leverage the power of Leap Motion to develop and deploy a fully interactive application

Mischa Spiegelmock

Leap Motion is a company developing advanced motion sensing technology for human–computer interaction. Originally inspired by the level of difficulty of using a mouse and keyboard for 3D modeling, Leap Motion believe that moulding virtual clay should be as easy as moulding clay in your hands. Leap Motion now focus on bringing this motion sensing technology closer to the real world.Leap Motion Development Essentials explains the concepts and practical applications of gesture input for developers who want to take full advantage of Leap Motion technology. This guide explores the capabilities available to developers and gives you a clear overview of topics related to gesture input along with usable code samples.Leap Motion Development Essentials shows you everything you need to know about the Leap Motion SDK, from creating a working program with gesture input to more sophisticated applications covering a range of relevant topics. Sample code is provided and explained along with details of the most important and central API concepts.This book teaches you the essential information you need to design a gesture-enabled interface for your application, from specific gesture detection to best practices for this new input. You will be given guidance on practical considerations along with copious runnable demonstrations of API usage which are explained in step-by-step, reusable recipes.

Advanced Python Programming. Accelerate your Python programs using proven techniques and design patterns - Second Edition

Quan Nguyen

Python's powerful capabilities for implementing robust and efficient programs make it one of the most sought-after programming languages.In this book, you'll explore the tools that allow you to improve performance and take your Python programs to the next level.This book starts by examining the built-in as well as external libraries that streamline tasks in the development cycle, such as benchmarking, profiling, and optimizing. You'll then get to grips with using specialized tools such as dedicated libraries and compilers to increase your performance at number-crunching tasks, including training machine learning models.The book covers concurrency, a major solution to making programs more efficient and scalable, and various concurrent programming techniques such as multithreading, multiprocessing, and asynchronous programming.You'll also understand the common problems that cause undesirable behavior in concurrent programs.Finally, you'll work with a wide range of design patterns, including creational, structural, and behavioral patterns that enable you to tackle complex design and architecture challenges, making your programs more robust and maintainable.By the end of the book, you'll be exposed to a wide range of advanced functionalities in Python and be equipped with the practical knowledge needed to apply them to your use cases.

Haxe Game Development Essentials. Create games on multiple platforms from a single codebase using Haxe and the HaxeFlixel engine

Jeremy McCurdy, Steven Richey

Haxe is a powerful and high-level multi-platform language that's incredibly easy to learn. Used by thousands of developers and many high-profile companies, Haxe is quickly emerging as a forerunner in the area of cross-platform programming. OpenFL builds on top of Haxe to make developing for multiple platforms quick and painless. HaxeFlixel provides you with the tools you need to build amazing 2D games easier than ever before. Cross-platform development has been supercharged using the Haxe programming language, making it increasingly easy and hassle-free to develop multi-platform games. If you've programmed games before and want to learn out how to deliver games across multiple platforms, or develop games faster, then Haxe Game Development Essentials is the book for you.It starts by showing you how to set up your development environment, then running you through some Haxe language fundamentals, and finally taking you through the process of programming a game from start to finish.You will learn how to create a side scrolling shooter game using HaxeFlixel. Next you will learn to enhance the game with new gameplay features, user interfaces, animations, sound, and configuration files to make your game expandable. Once your game is built and ready, you will learn how to deploy it to web, Android, iOS, and desktop systems. By the end of this book, you will be confident about creating multi-platform games using Haxe, OpenFL, and HaxeFlixel in a faster and easier way.

Spark Cookbook. With over 60 recipes on Spark, covering Spark Core, Spark SQL, Spark Streaming, MLlib, and GraphX libraries this is the perfect Spark book to always have by your side

Rishi Yadav