Data Science for Decision Makers. Enhance your leadership skills with data science and AI expertise

Jon Howells

As data science and artificial intelligence (AI) become prevalent across industries, executives without formal education in statistics and machine learning, as well as data scientists moving into leadership roles, must learn how to make informed decisions about complex models and manage data teams. This book will elevate your leadership skills by guiding you through the core concepts of data science and AI.This comprehensive guide is designed to bridge the gap between business needs and technical solutions, empowering you to make informed decisions and drive measurable value within your organization. Through practical examples and clear explanations, you'll learn how to collect and analyze structured and unstructured data, build a strong foundation in statistics and machine learning, and evaluate models confidently. By recognizing common pitfalls and valuable use cases, you'll plan data science projects effectively, from the ground up to completion. Beyond technical aspects, this book provides tools to recruit top talent, manage high-performing teams, and stay up to date with industry advancements.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to characterize the data within your organization and frame business problems as data science problems.

Creative Motion Mastery with Adobe After Effects. Learn the ins and outs of motion graphics, post-production, rotoscoping, and VFX

Vishu Aggarwal

Visual effects and motion graphics are everywhere, shaping the film, TV, games, websites, and application landscape. Navigating a field this complex and ever-expanding demands more than mere familiarity with tools; you need to stand out to get ahead. Creative Motion Mastery with Adobe After Effects is the definitive guide that not only equips you with the essential skills to distinguish yourself, but also takes you through real projects that you can add to your portfolio.Guided by a hands-on learning approach, you'll master the UI, workflow, and diverse projects such as text animation, shape layers, and rotoscoping. With this newfound knowledge, you’ll take your graphic design and post-production skills to the next level using chroma keying, particle simulations, and 2D and 3D tracking. You’ll progress faster than someone taking a formal course in Adobe After Effects! And it’s not all about creating; you’ll import graphics from Illustrator and Photoshop and apply post-production effects to give them a new life. Finally, you’ll discover how seamlessly you can export and manage your projects, ensuring end-to-end coverage of all you need.By the end of the book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of Adobe After Effects, equipped with the skills and practice you need to propel your career in graphic design.

Transformers for Natural Language Processing. Build innovative deep neural network architectures for NLP with Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, BERT, RoBERTa, and more

Denis Rothman

The transformer architecture has proved to be revolutionary in outperforming the classical RNN and CNN models in use today. With an apply-as-you-learn approach, Transformers for Natural Language Processing investigates in vast detail the deep learning for machine translations, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, language modeling, question answering, and many more NLP domains with transformers.The book takes you through NLP with Python and examines various eminent models and datasets within the transformer architecture created by pioneers such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Hugging Face.The book trains you in three stages. The first stage introduces you to transformer architectures, starting with the original transformer, before moving on to RoBERTa, BERT, and DistilBERT models. You will discover training methods for smaller transformers that can outperform GPT-3 in some cases. In the second stage, you will apply transformers for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG). Finally, the third stage will help you grasp advanced language understanding techniques such as optimizing social network datasets and fake news identification.By the end of this NLP book, you will understand transformers from a cognitive science perspective and be proficient in applying pretrained transformer models by tech giants to various datasets.

Hands-On Machine Learning with ML.NET. Getting started with Microsoft ML.NET to implement popular machine learning algorithms in C#

Jarred Capellman

Machine learning (ML) is widely used in many industries such as science, healthcare, and research and its popularity is only growing. In March 2018, Microsoft introduced ML.NET to help .NET enthusiasts in working with ML. With this book, you’ll explore how to build ML.NET applications with the various ML models available using C# code.The book starts by giving you an overview of ML and the types of ML algorithms used, along with covering what ML.NET is and why you need it to build ML apps. You’ll then explore the ML.NET framework, its components, and APIs. The book will serve as a practical guide to helping you build smart apps using the ML.NET library. You’ll gradually become well versed in how to implement ML algorithms such as regression, classification, and clustering with real-world examples and datasets. Each chapter will cover the practical implementation, showing you how to implement ML within .NET applications. You’ll also learn to integrate TensorFlow in ML.NET applications. Later you’ll discover how to store the regression model housing price prediction result to the database and display the real-time predicted results from the database on your web application using ASP.NET Core Blazor and SignalR.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to confidently perform basic to advanced-level machine learning tasks in ML.NET.

Cybersecurity Architect's Handbook. An end-to-end guide to implementing and maintaining robust security architecture

Lester Nichols

Stepping into the role of a Cybersecurity Architect (CSA) is no mean feat; it requires both upskilling and a fundamental shift in how you view cybersecurity. Written by a seasoned cybersecurity expert with over two decades of experience spanning the public and private sectors, this all-encompassing guide outlines an accessible a path for cybersecurity engineers and newcomers to evolve into architects, sharing best practices to enhance your skills.After a brief introduction to the role and foundational concepts, this book will help you understand the day-to-day challenges faced by CSAs, supported by practical examples. You'll gain insights into assessing and improving your organization’s security posture, including system, hardware, and software security. You'll also learn how to set user and system policies and protocols through effective monitoring and enforcement, and understanding countermeasures that protect the system from unauthorized access attempts.To prepare you for the road ahead and augment your existing skills, the book provides invaluable tips and practices that will contribute to your success as a CSA. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to take up the CSA role and execute robust security solutions.

JSF 2.0 Cookbook: LITE. Converters, Validators, and Security

Anghel Leonard

OpenLayers 3.x Cookbook. This book will provide users with a variety of recipes that illustrate different features present in OpenLayers 3 - Second Edition

Peter J. Langley, Antonio Santiago Perez

OpenLayers 3 is one of the most important and complete open source JavaScript mapping libraries today. Throughout this book, you will go through recipes that expose various features of OpenLayers 3, allowing you to gain an insight into building complex GIS web applications.You will get to grips with the basics of creating a map with common functionality and quickly advance to more complicated solutions that address modern challenges. You will explore into maps, raster and vector layers, and styling in depth. This book also includes problem solving and how-to recipes for the most common and important tasks.

OpenAI API Cookbook. Build intelligent applications including chatbots, virtual assistants, and content generators

Henry Habib, Sam McKay, Paul Siegel

As artificial intelligence continues to reshape industries with OpenAI at the forefront of AI research, knowing how to create innovative applications such as chatbots, virtual assistants, content generators, and productivity enhancers is a game-changer. This book takes a practical, recipe-based approach to unlocking the power of OpenAI API to build high-performance intelligent applications in diverse industries and seamlessly integrate ChatGPT in your workflows to increase productivity.You’ll begin with the OpenAI API fundamentals, covering setup, authentication, and key parameters, and quickly progress to the different elements of the OpenAI API. Once you’ve learned how to use it effectively and tweak parameters for better results, you’ll follow advanced recipes for enhancing user experience and refining outputs. The book guides your transition from development to live application deployment, setting up the API for public use and application backend. Further, you’ll discover step-by-step recipes for building knowledge-based assistants and multi-model applications tailored to your specific needs.By the end of this book, you’ll have worked through recipes involving various OpenAI API endpoints and built a variety of intelligent applications, ready to apply this experience to building AI-powered solutions of your own.

Visual Media Processing Using MATLAB Beginner's Guide. Using the versatility and power of MATLAB to apply sophisticated effects to images and videos is easy for novice programmers in any language thanks to this fantastic guide. Also suitable for photographers and video-editors

George Siogkas

Whether you want to enhance your holiday photographs or make a professional banner image for your website, you need a software tool that offers you quick and easy ways to accomplish it. All-in-one tools tend to be rare, and Matlab is one of the best available.This book is a practical guide full of step-by-step examples and exercises that will enable you to use Matlab as a powerful, complete, and versatile alternative to traditional image and video processing software.You will start off by learning the very basics of grayscale image manipulation in Matlab to master how to analyze 3-dimensional images and videos using the same tool. The methods you learn here are explained and expanded upon so that you gradually reach a more advanced level in Matlab image and video processing.You will be guided through the steps of opening, transforming, and saving images, later to be mixed with advanced masking techniques both in grayscale and in color. More advanced examples of artistic image processing are also provided, like creating panoramic photographs or HDR images. The second part of the book covers video processing techniques and guides you through the processes of creating time-lapse videos from still images, and acquiring, filtering, and saving videos in Matlab.You will learn how to use many useful functions and tools that transform Matlab from a scientific software to a powerful and complete solution for your everyday image and video processing needs.

haXe 2 Beginner's Guide. Develop exciting applications with this multi-platform programming language

Benjamin Dasnois, haXe PAYPAL haxelang@gmail.com

Mastering Social Media Mining with R. Extract valuable data from your social media sites and make better business decisions using R

Vikram Garg, Sharan Kumar Ravindran

With an increase in the number of users on the web, the content generated has increased substantially, bringing in the need to gain insights into the untapped gold mine that is social media data. For computational statistics, R has an advantage over other languages in providing readily-available data extraction and transformation packages, making it easier to carry out your ETL tasks. Along with this, its data visualization packages help users get a better understanding of the underlying data distributions while its range of standard statistical packages simplify analysis of the data.This book will teach you how powerful business cases are solved by applying machine learning techniques on social media data. You will learn about important and recent developments in the field of social media, along with a few advanced topics such as Open Authorization (OAuth). Through practical examples, you will access data from R using APIs of various social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, GitHub, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Blogger, and other networks. We will provide you with detailed explanations on the implementation of various use cases using R programming.With this handy guide, you will be ready to embark on your journey as an independent social media analyst.

Babylon.js Essentials. Understand, train, and be ready to develop 3D Web applications/video games using the Babylon.js framework, even for beginners

Julien Moreau-Mathis

Are you familiar with HTML5? Do you want to build exciting games and Web applications? Then explore the exciting world of game and Web development with one of the best frameworks out there: Babylon.JS.Starting from the beginning, the book introduces the required basics for 3D development and the knowledge you need to use the Babylon.js framework. It focuses on the simplicity provided by Babylon.js and uses a combination of theory and practice. All the chapters are provided with example files ready to run; each example file provides the previously learned features of the framework. Finally, developers will be ready to easily understand new features added to the framework in the future.

Learn Power BI. A comprehensive, step-by-step guide for beginners to learn real-world business intelligence - Second Edition

Greg Deckler

To succeed in today's transforming business world, organizations need business intelligence capabilities to make smarter decisions faster than ever before. This updated second edition of Learn Power BI takes you on a journey of data exploration and discovery, using Microsoft Power BI to ingest, cleanse, and organize data in order to unlock key business insights that can then be shared with others.This newly revised and expanded edition of Learn Power BI covers all of the latest features and interface changes and takes you through the fundamentals of business intelligence projects, how to deploy, adopt, and govern Power BI within your organization, and how to leverage your knowledge in the marketplace and broader ecosystem that is Power BI. As you progress, you will learn how to ingest, cleanse, and transform your data into stunning visualizations, reports, and dashboards that speak to business decision-makers.By the end of this Power BI book, you will be fully prepared to be the data analysis hero of your organization – or even start a new career as a business intelligence professional.

Management in India: Grow from an Accidental to a successful manager in the IT & knowledge industry. A real-world, practical book for a professional in his journey to becoming a successful manager in India with this book and

Rahul Goyal

Most managers are untrained and need a foundation of management thought processes and frameworks. The market has books that are very theory heavy and generalized, and lack a certain focus. Nothing seen so far has the right context and balance of management theory and real world practical information.Written by Rahul Goyal, a top manager at an IT firm, this book is an easy-to-read map to help you navigate the journey of being a manager in the knowledge industry. It will increase your effectiveness in applying skills needed daily, like hiring, communicating, motivating and planning. Learn from examples that you can relate to, and theories explained in context. The books starts with raising a number of questions that knowledge industry managers face everyday. Then it gives detailed explanation of the roles and responsibilities of being a manager and maps the classic Herzberg's ten managerial roles into today's knowledge industry context. Next it focuses on the transition from being an individual contributor to a manager, the typical issues one faces and how to make it easier in this transition phase. The next chapter digs into what is required to be a manager and the behaviours required for being a manager in India. We then dive into the key aspects of being a manager such as how to build a team and create team spirit, understanding the process of hiring and figuring out the adequate compensation for a new hire, managing the critical campus hiring process, and understanding what motivates a knowledge worker.Then the book covers the basic motivation theories, explained in an Indian context. The book will get into the details of performance evaluation processes and the common pitfalls of the same. You will learn how to plan for personal effectiveness and an execution plan for delivery.Finally, we look beyond the basics of managing and explore how a manager can grow. It's easy to get lost in the daily hustleand bustle and forget the essentials that can take you past your current career level. We look through some simple dos' and don'ts and keep growth in perspective while being a manager.

Data Governance Handbook. A practical approach to building trust in data

Wendy S. Batchelder

2.5 quintillion bytes! This is the amount of data being generated every single day across the globe. As this number continues to grow, understanding and managing data becomes more complex. Data professionals know that it’s their responsibility to navigate this complexity and ensure effective governance, empowering businesses with the right data, at the right time, and with the right controls.If you are a data professional, this book will equip you with valuable guidance to conquer data governance complexities with ease. Written by a three-time chief data officer in global Fortune 500 companies, the Data Governance Handbook is an exhaustive guide to understanding data governance, its key components, and how to successfully position solutions in a way that translates into tangible business outcomes.By the end, you’ll be able to successfully pitch and gain support for your data governance program, demonstrating tangible outcomes that resonate with key stakeholders.

Unreal Engine 4 Shaders and Effects Cookbook. Over 70 recipes for mastering post-processing effects and advanced shading techniques

Brais Brenlla Ramos, John P. Doran

Unreal Engine 4 is a powerful game engine, one which has seen a recent boost in widespread adoption thanks to its ease of use and the powerful rendering pipeline that it packs. Seeing as how it's relatively easy to create stunning presentations and visuals, Unreal has quickly become a strong contender in industries where this kind of software had been previously denied entry.With that in mind, this book aims to help you get the most out of Unreal Engine 4 - from creating awe-inspiring graphics to delivering optimized experiences to your users. This is possible thanks to a mixture of hands-on experience with real materials and the theory behind them. You will immediately know how to create that material that you want to display, and you'll also end up with the knowledge that will let you know how to control it.All of this will be done without losing sight of two key components of any real-time application - optimization, and efficiency. The materials that you create will be light and efficient, and they will vary depending on your target platform. You'll know which techniques can be used in any kind of device and which ones should be kept to high-end machines, giving you the confidence to tackle any material-related task that you can imagine. Hop onboard and discover how!

Mastering Android Wear Application Development. Master the Android Wear SDK and APIs to build cutting edge wearable apps

Simone Casagranda, Siddique Hameed, Javeed Chida

Wearable technology is the future of mobile devices. It looks set to be a breakthrough technology, just like the iPad was before it. With the Apple Watch being widely regarded as a success, all eyes are now on Google to provide a similar device for its users. Keep your skills ahead of the competition and be one of the first to fully understand this powerful new trend. This book will give you a very solid understanding of the philosophy, thought process, development details, and methodologies involved in building well-designed, robust Android Wear applications.We cover the advantages and disadvantages of the wearable computing paradigm and provide a good foundational knowledge for you to build practical, real-world wearable apps. You will learn about the various tools, platforms, libraries, SDKs, and technology needed to build Android Wear apps. By the end of the book, you will be an expert in building Android wearable apps.

Implementing Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies: AZ-303 Exam Prep and Beyond. A guide to preparing for the AZ-303 Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies certification exam - Second Edition

Brett Hargreaves, Sjoukje Zaal

From designing solutions on Azure to configuring and managing virtual networks, the AZ-303 certification validates your knowledge and skills for all this and much more. Whether you want to take the certification exam or gain hands-on experience in administering, developing, and architecting Azure solutions, this study guide will help you get started.Divided into four modules, this book systematically takes you through the wide range of concepts and features covered in the AZ-303 exam. The first module demonstrates how to implement and monitor infrastructure. You'll develop the skills required to deploy and manage core Azure components such as virtual machines, networking, storage, and Active Directory (AD). As you progress, you'll build on that knowledge and learn how to create resilient and secure applications before moving on to working with web apps, functions, and containers. The final module will get you up to speed with data platforms such as SQL and Cosmos DB, including how to configure the different high availability options. Finally, you'll solve mock tests and assess yourself with the answers provided to get ready to take the exam with confidence.By the end of this book, you'll have learned the concepts and techniques you need to know to prepare for the AZ-303 exam and design effective solutions on Microsoft Azure.

Artificial Intelligence with Python Cookbook. Proven recipes for applying AI algorithms and deep learning techniques using TensorFlow 2.x and PyTorch 1.6

Ben Auffarth

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays an integral role in automating problem-solving. This involves predicting and classifying data and training agents to execute tasks successfully. This book will teach you how to solve complex problems with the help of independent and insightful recipes ranging from the essentials to advanced methods that have just come out of research.Artificial Intelligence with Python Cookbook starts by showing you how to set up your Python environment and taking you through the fundamentals of data exploration. Moving ahead, you’ll be able to implement heuristic search techniques and genetic algorithms. In addition to this, you'll apply probabilistic models, constraint optimization, and reinforcement learning. As you advance through the book, you'll build deep learning models for text, images, video, and audio, and then delve into algorithmic bias, style transfer, music generation, and AI use cases in the healthcare and insurance industries. Throughout the book, you’ll learn about a variety of tools for problem-solving and gain the knowledge needed to effectively approach complex problems.By the end of this book on AI, you will have the skills you need to write AI and machine learning algorithms, test them, and deploy them for production.

Mastering SoapUI. Experience SOA Test and Test Automation from an expert view

Pranai Nandan, Surendra Mohan

SoapUI is an open-source cross-platform testing application that provides complete test coverage and supports all the standard protocols and technologies. This book includes real-time examples of implementing SoapUI to achieve quality and business assurance.Starting with the features and functionalities of SoapUI, the book will then focus on functional testing, load testing, and security testing of web services. Furthermore, you will learn how to automate your services and then design data-driven, keyword-driven, and hybrid-driven frameworks in SoapUI. Then the book will show you how to test UIs and services using SoapUI with the help of Selenium. You will also learn how to integrate SoapUI with Jenkins for CI and SoapUI test with QC with backward- and forward-compatibility. The final part of the book will show you how to virtualize a service response in SoapUI using Service Mocking. You will finish the journey by discovering the best practices for SoapUI test automation and preparing yourself for the online certification of SoapUI.

Autodesk AutoCAD 2013 Practical 3D Drafting and Design. Take your AuotoCAD design skills to the next dimension by creating powerful 3D models

JOAO ANTONIO C DOS SANTOS

AutoCAD is a computer-aided design (CAD) and drafting software application. AutoCAD supports both 2D and 3D formats. AutoCAD is used in a range of industries and is utilized by architects, project managers, and engineers, among others.Autodesk AutoCAD 2013 Practical 3D Drafting and Design will take you beyond the 2D frontier and help you create accurate 3D models that simulate reality. This book is crammed full of creative and practical tutorials which will help you master the third dimension. From exercises on coordinate systems to creating solids and surfaces from 2D, you will wonder how you ever designed without this resource by your side.Autodesk AutoCAD 2013 Practical 3D Drafting and Design is full of hands-on studies and projects that will help develop your 3D skills. Starting from the assumption of only a very basic knowledge of AutoCAD, this book will help you master 3D visualization and coordinate systems, create 3D models from 2D drawings, and from basic shapes, measure volumes, and other information, obtain 2D construction drawings from 3D models as well as how to apply lights and materials to get photorealistic images.

Android 9 Development Cookbook. Over 100 recipes and solutions to solve the most common problems faced by Android developers - Third Edition

Rick Boyer

The Android OS has the largest installation base of any operating system in the world. There has never been a better time to learn Android development to write your own applications, or to make your own contributions to the open source community! With this extensively updated cookbook, you'll find solutions for working with the user interfaces, multitouch gestures, location awareness, web services, and device features such as the phone, camera, and accelerometer. You also get useful steps on packaging your app for the Android Market. Each recipe provides a clear solution and sample code you can use in your project from the outset. Whether you are writing your first app or your hundredth, this is a book that you will come back to time and time again, with its many tips and tricks on the rich features of Android Pie.

Mastering PowerShell Scripting. Automate and manage your environment using PowerShell 7.1 - Fourth Edition

Chris Dent

PowerShell scripts offer a convenient way to automate various tasks, but working with them can be daunting. Mastering PowerShell Scripting takes away the fear and helps you navigate through PowerShell's capabilities.This extensively revised edition includes new chapters on debugging and troubleshooting and creating GUIs (online chapter). Learn the new features of PowerShell 7.1 by working with parameters, objects, and .NET classes from within PowerShell 7.1.This comprehensive guide starts with the basics before moving on to advanced topics, including asynchronous processing, desired state configuration, using more complex scripts and filters, debugging issues, and error-handling techniques. Explore how to efficiently manage substantial amounts of data and interact with other services using PowerShell 7.1. This book will help you to make the most of PowerShell's automation features, using different methods to parse data, manipulate regular expressions, and work with Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).

Mastering Python Data Visualization. Generate effective results in a variety of visually appealing charts using the plotting packages in Python

Kirthi Raman, Sebastian Cheung, Kirthi Venkatraman