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.

Learning VMware vSphere. Click here to enter text

Rebecca Fitzhugh, Abhilash G B

Computer virtualization is a method to enable the running of multiple application workloads on a machine to achieve efficient utilization and reduce the number of physical machines in a data center. This has now become the foundation of many modern day data centers. What began as a technology to virtualize x86 architecture has now grown beyond the limits of a server’s hardware and into the realm of storage and network virtualization. VMware is currently the market leader in developing data center virtualization solutions. This book goes into the details of designing and implementing VMware solutions that form the foundation of a VMware infrastructure.The book begins by introducing you to the concepts of server virtualization followed by the architecture of VMware’s hypervisor – ESXi and then by its installation and configuration. You then learn what is required to manage a vSphere environment and configure advanced management capabilities of vCenter. Next you are taken through topics on vSphere Networking, Storage, ESXi Clustering, Resource Management and Virtual Machine Management. You will then be introduced to SSL Certificate Management and its use in a vSphere environment. Finally, you will learn about the lifecycle management of a vSphere environment by effectively monitoring, patching and upgrading vSphere components using Update Manager. By the end of the book, you will know how to use VMware’s vSphere suite of components to lay the foundation of a modern day virtual infrastructure.

Growth Product Manager's Handbook. Winning strategies and frameworks for driving user acquisition, retention, and optimizing metrics

Eve Chen

In the dynamic landscape of modern product management, professionals face a myriad of challenges, spanning customer acquisition, monetization, user retention, competition, and technical expertise. To overcome these hurdles, this book crystalizes growth strategies that revolve around harnessing the power of data, experimentation, and user insights to drive growth for a product.This handbook serves as your guide to exploring the essential growth product management models and their applications in various contexts, unveiling their role in enhancing revenue performance and customer retention. Along the way, actionable steps will steer you in implementing these models while helping you better understand your users, experiment with new features and marketing strategies, and measure the impact of your efforts, ultimately guiding you to achieve your customer retention and lifetime customer goals.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained advanced insights into growth product management, models, and growth strategies, and when and how to use them to achieve customer-for-life goals and optimized revenue performance.

Unity Certified Programmer Exam Guide. Pass the Unity certification exam with the help of expert tips and techniques - Second Edition

Philip Walker

Unity Certified Programmer is a global certification program by Unity for anyone looking to become a professional Unity developer. The official Unity programmer exam will not only validate your Unity knowledge and skills, but will also enable you to be a part of the Unity community.This study guide will start by building on your understanding of C# programming and taking you through the process of downloading and installing Unity. You’ll understand how Unity works and get to grips with the Unity exam’s core objectives. As you advance, you’ll enhance your skills by creating an enjoyable side-scrolling shooter game that can be played within the Unity Editor or any modern Android mobile device. This Unity book will test your knowledge with self-assessment questions and help you take your skills to an advanced level by working with Unity tools such as the animator, particle effects, lighting, UI/UX, scriptable objects, and debugging.By the end of this book, you’ll have developed a solid understanding of the different tools in Unity and be able to create impressive Unity applications by making the most of its toolset.

Applied Computational Thinking with Python. Design algorithmic solutions for complex and challenging real-world problems

Sofía De Jesús, Dayrene Martinez

Computational thinking helps you to develop logical processing and algorithmic thinking while solving real-world problems across a wide range of domains. It's an essential skill that you should possess to keep ahead of the curve in this modern era of information technology. Developers can apply their knowledge of computational thinking to solve problems in multiple areas, including economics, mathematics, and artificial intelligence.This book begins by helping you get to grips with decomposition, pattern recognition, pattern generalization and abstraction, and algorithm design, along with teaching you how to apply these elements practically while designing solutions for challenging problems. You’ll then learn about various techniques involved in problem analysis, logical reasoning, algorithm design, clusters and classification, data analysis, and modeling, and understand how computational thinking elements can be used together with these aspects to design solutions. Toward the end, you will discover how to identify pitfalls in the solution design process and how to choose the right functionalities to create the best possible algorithmic solutions.By the end of this algorithm book, you will have gained the confidence to successfully apply computational thinking techniques to software development.

WordPress 3 Ultimate Security. WordPress is for everyone and so is this brilliant book on making your site impenetrable to hackers. This jargon-lite guide covers everything from stopping content scrapers to understanding disaster recovery

Olly Connelly, Oliver W Connelly

Most likely – today – some hacker tried to crack your WordPress site, its data and content – maybe once but, with automated tools, very likely dozens or hundreds of times. There's no silver bullet but if you want to cut the odds of a successful attack from practically inevitable to practically zero, read this book.WordPress 3 Ultimate Security shows you how to hack your site before someone else does. You'll uncover its weaknesses before sealing them off, securing your content and your day-to-day local-to-remote editorial process. This is more than some 10 Tips ... guide. It's ultimate protection – because that's what you need.Survey your network, using the insight from this book to scan for and seal the holes before galvanizing the network with a rack of cool tools. Solid!The WordPress platform is only as safe as the weakest network link, administrator discipline, and your security knowledge. We'll cover the bases, underpinning your working process from any location, containing content, locking down the platform, your web files, the database, and the server. With that done, your ongoing security is infinitely more manageable.Covering deep-set security yet enjoyable to read, WordPress 3 Ultimate Security will multiply your understanding and fortify your site.

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan. Develop a modern rendering engine from first principles to state-of-the-art techniques

Marco Castorina, Gabriel Sassone

Vulkan is now an established and flexible multi-platform graphics API. It has been adopted in many industries, including game development, medical imaging, movie productions, and media playback but learning it can be a daunting challenge due to its low-level, complex nature. Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan is designed to help you overcome this difficulty, providing a practical approach to learning one of the most advanced graphics APIs.In Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan, you’ll focus on building a high-performance rendering engine from the ground up. You’ll explore Vulkan’s advanced features, such as pipeline layouts, resource barriers, and GPU-driven rendering, to automate tedious tasks and create efficient workflows. Additionally, you'll delve into cutting-edge techniques like mesh shaders and real-time ray tracing, elevating your graphics programming to the next level.By the end of this book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of modern rendering engines to confidently handle large-scale projects. Whether you're developing games, simulations, or visual effects, this guide will equip you with the skills and knowledge to harness Vulkan’s full potential.

Service Worker Development Cookbook. Click here to enter text

Sean Amarasinghe

It would be nice to have web apps that work offline and send push notifications. This is now possible with Service Workers, which can add native-like functionality to your web apps without requiring a download. This book will get your mobile and web apps functioning without Internet connectivity, improve performance and network interaction in order to increase the level of availability, and show you how to build performant applications that seamlessly integrate with third-party APIs.We’ll show you how to add Service Worker functionality to web apps and sites, access offline content through basic and advanced techniques, and build powerful interactive system notifications. We’ll also teach you about cache functionality and assets to provide immediate load even over narrow connections. We conclude by giving you various tips to improve app performance, including the background sync technique. By the end of this book, you’ll know build high performing and faster web and mobile applications with Service Workers.

ASP.NET Core 8 and Angular. Full-stack web development with ASP.NET Core 8 and Angular - Sixth Edition

Valerio De Sanctis

If you want to learn how to use ASP.NET Core with Angular effectively, this hands-on guide is for you.Improve the way you create, debug, and deploy web applications while keeping up to date with the latest developments in .NET 8 and modern Angular, including .NET Minimal APIs and the new Angular standalone API defaults.You’ll begin by setting up SQL Server 2022 and building a data model with Entity Framework Core. You’ll progress to fetching and displaying data, handling user input with Angular reactive forms, and implementing front-end and back-end validators for maximum effect. After that, you will perform advanced debugging and explore unit testing features with xUnit for .NET, and Jasmine and Karma for Angular. You’ll use Identity API endpoints in ASP.NET Core and functional route guards in Angular to add authentication and authorization to your apps. Finally, you’ll learn how to deploy to Windows, Linux, and Azure.By the end of this book, you will understand how to tie together the front-end and back-end to build and deploy secure and robust web applications.

Scala Data Analysis Cookbook. Navigate the world of data analysis, visualization, and machine learning with over 100 hands-on Scala recipes

Arun Manivannan

This book will introduce you to the most popular Scala tools, libraries, and frameworks through practical recipes around loading, manipulating, and preparing your data. It will also help you explore and make sense of your data using stunning and insightfulvisualizations, and machine learning toolkits.Starting with introductory recipes on utilizing the Breeze and Spark libraries, get to grips withhow to import data from a host of possible sources and how to pre-process numerical, string, and date data. Next, you’ll get an understanding of concepts that will help you visualize data using the Apache Zeppelin and Bokeh bindings in Scala, enabling exploratory data analysis. iscover how to program quintessential machine learning algorithms using Spark ML library. Work through steps to scale your machine learning models and deploy them into a standalone cluster, EC2, YARN, and Mesos. Finally dip into the powerful options presented by Spark Streaming, and machine learning for streaming data, as well as utilizing Spark GraphX.

Google Machine Learning and Generative AI for Solutions Architects. ​Build efficient and scalable AI/ML solutions on Google Cloud

Kieran Kavanagh, Priyanka Vergadia

Most companies today are incorporating AI/ML into their businesses. Building and running apps utilizing AI/ML effectively is tough. This book, authored by a principal architect with about two decades of industry experience, who has led cross-functional teams to design, plan, implement, and govern enterprise cloud strategies, shows you exactly how to design and run AI/ML workloads successfully using years of experience from some of the world’s leading tech companies.You’ll get a clear understanding of essential fundamental AI/ML concepts, before moving on to complex topics with the help of examples and hands-on activities. This will help you explore advanced, cutting-edge AI/ML applications that address real-world use cases in today’s market. You’ll recognize the common challenges that companies face when implementing AI/ML workloads, and discover industry-proven best practices to overcome these. The chapters also teach you about the vast AI/ML landscape on Google Cloud and how to implement all the steps needed in a typical AI/ML project. You’ll use services such as BigQuery to prepare data; Vertex AI to train, deploy, monitor, and scale models in production; as well as MLOps to automate the entire process.By the end of this book, you will be able to unlock the full potential of Google Cloud's AI/ML offerings.

Transforming Healthcare with DevOps. A practical DevOps4Care guide to embracing the complexity of digital transformation

Jeroen Mulder, Henry Mulder

Healthcare today faces a multitude of challenges, which can be summed up as the barriers architects and consultants face in transforming the healthcare system into a more sustainable one. This book helps you to guide that transformation step by step.You’ll begin by understanding the need for this transformation, exploring related challenges, the possibilities of technology, and how human factors can be involved in digital transformation. The book will enable you to overcome inhibitions and plan various transformation steps using the Transformation into Sustainable Healthcare (TiSH) model and DevOps4Care. Next, you’ll use the observe, orient, decide, and act (OODA) loop as an iterative approach to address all stakeholders and adapt swiftly when situations change. Further, you’ll be able to build shared platforms that enable interaction between various stakeholders, including the technology-enabled care service teams. The final chapters will help you execute the transformation to sustainable healthcare using the knowledge you’ve gained while getting familiar with common pitfalls and learning how to avoid or mitigate them.By the end of this DevOps book, you will have an overview of the challenges, opportunities, and directions of solutions and be on your way toward starting the transformation into sustainable healthcare.

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

Bass Jobsen

ArcGIS for Desktop Cookbook. Over 60 hands-on recipes to help you become a more productive ArcGIS for Desktop user

Daniela C Docan

JBoss Weld CDI for Java Platform. Learn CDI concepts and develop modern web applications using JBoss Weld

Ken Finnigan, Kenneth Finnigan

CDI simplifies dependency injection for modern application developers by taking advantage of Java annotations and moving away from complex XML, while at the same time providing an extensible and powerful programming model.JBoss Weld CDI for Java Platform is a practical guide to CDI's dependency injection concepts using clear and easy-to-follow examples. This will help you take advantage of the power behind CDI, as well as providing a firm understanding of how to use it within your applications.JBoss Weld CDI for Java Platform covers all the major aspects of CDI, breaking it down into understandable pieces. This book will take you through many examples of how these concepts can be utilized, helping you get up and running quickly and painlessly.JBoss Weld CDI for Java Platform gives you an insight into the different scopes provided by CDI and the use cases for which each has been designed. You will learn everything about dependency injection, scopes, events, producers, and more from JBoss Weld CDI, as well as how producers can create new beans for consumption within your application. You will also learn how to build a real world application with CDI using JSF and AngularJS for different web interfaces.

Linux Service Management Made Easy with systemd. Advanced techniques to effectively manage, control, and monitor Linux systems and services

Donald A. Tevault

Linux Service Management Made Easy with systemd will provide you with an in-depth understanding of systemd, so that you can set up your servers securely and efficiently.This is a comprehensive guide for Linux administrators that will help you get the best of systemd, starting with an explanation of the fundamentals of systemd management.You’ll also learn how to edit and create your own systemd units, which will be particularly helpful if you need to create custom services or timers and add features or security to an existing service. Next, you'll find out how to analyze and fix boot-up challenges and set system parameters. An overview of cgroups that'll help you control system resource usage for both processes and users will also be covered, alongside a practical demonstration on how cgroups are structured, spotting the differences between cgroups Version 1 and 2, and how to set resource limits on both. Finally, you'll learn about the systemd way of performing time-keeping, networking, logging, and login management. You'll discover how to configure servers accurately and gather system information to analyze system security and performance. By the end of this Linux book, you’ll be able to efficiently manage all aspects of a server running the systemd init system.

Data Engineering with Scala and Spark. Build streaming and batch pipelines that process massive amounts of data using Scala

Eric Tome, Rupam Bhattacharjee, David Radford

Most data engineers know that performance issues in a distributed computing environment can easily lead to issues impacting the overall efficiency and effectiveness of data engineering tasks. While Python remains a popular choice for data engineering due to its ease of use, Scala shines in scenarios where the performance of distributed data processing is paramount.This book will teach you how to leverage the Scala programming language on the Spark framework and use the latest cloud technologies to build continuous and triggered data pipelines. You’ll do this by setting up a data engineering environment for local development and scalable distributed cloud deployments using data engineering best practices, test-driven development, and CI/CD. You’ll also get to grips with DataFrame API, Dataset API, and Spark SQL API and its use. Data profiling and quality in Scala will also be covered, alongside techniques for orchestrating and performance tuning your end-to-end pipelines to deliver data to your end users. By the end of this book, you will be able to build streaming and batch data pipelines using Scala while following software engineering best practices.

SAP Intelligent RPA for Developers. Automate business processes using SAP Intelligent RPA and learn the migration path to SAP Process Automation

Vishwas Madhuvarshi, Vijaya Kumar Ganugula

SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (RPA) enables businesses to automate repetitive work and integrate automation capabilities across SAP and non-SAP systems.This book provides end-to-end coverage of business process automation using SAP Intelligent RPA and shows how to build multiple SAP Intelligent RPA projects from start to finish. Some of these projects may build upon the work done in previous chapters to showcase the Agile development process in SAP Intelligent RPA.As you progress, you'll cover the SAP Intelligent RPA factory, Desktop Studio, Cloud Studio, and the Bot store. You'll also learn about the building blocks of the SAP Intelligent RPA solution and creating bots from initial application declaration to workflow design and deployment, along with making bots run in attended and unattended modes.You'll also learn about SAP Process Automation, the new SAP service that is going to replace the SAP Intelligent RPA service soon. Finally, we will discuss the migration path for your SAP Intelligent RPA projects to SAP Process Automation and showcase that the RPA development remains similar in both services.By the end of this RPA book, you’ll be able to create and manage complex bots that are capable of interacting with SAP and non-SAP systems.

Learning Network Forensics. Identify and safeguard your network against both internal and external threats, hackers, and malware attacks

Samir Datt

We live in a highly networked world. Every digital device—phone, tablet, or computer is connected to each other, in one way or another. In this new age of connected networks, there is network crime. Network forensics is the brave new frontier of digital investigation and information security professionals to extend their abilities to catch miscreants on the network.The book starts with an introduction to the world of network forensics and investigations. You will begin by getting an understanding of how to gather both physical and virtual evidence, intercepting and analyzing network data, wireless data packets, investigating intrusions, and so on. You will further explore the technology, tools, and investigating methods using malware forensics, network tunneling, and behaviors. By the end of the book, you will gain a complete understanding of how to successfully close a case.

Zabbix 7 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook. Explore the new features of Zabbix 7 for designing, building, and maintaining your Zabbix setup - Third Edition

Nathan Liefting, Brian van Baekel, Alexei Vladishev

Realize the full potential of Zabbix 7 with this updated third edition of the Zabbix 7 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook. Packed with new recipes and updated with the latest Zabbix functionalities, this guide covers everything you need, whether you’re setting up Zabbix with built-in (proxy) high availability, using LDAP JIT user provisioning, implementing low-level host discovery, or creating advanced triggers.This hands-on guide offers easy-to-follow recipes to use Zabbix 7 to monitor the performance of devices and applications across your network. You'll start by learning how to install Zabbix and examine its most prominent features, ensuring you make the right design choices to build a scalable and easily manageable environment. Each recipe is crafted to help you build items and triggers for different types of monitoring, create templates, and use Zabbix proxies. You'll also get to grips with using the Zabbix API for customization and managing your Zabbix server and database. Finally, you'll find quick solutions to the common and not-so-common problems that you may encounter in your Zabbix monitoring work.By the end of this book, you'll have expert insights into using Zabbix for all your monitoring needs and be able to build a solid Zabbix setup by leveraging its key functionalities.

PostgreSQL Server Programming. Extend PostgreSQL using PostgreSQL server programming to create, test, debug, and optimize a range of user-defined functions in your favorite programming language

Usama Dar, Kirk Roybal, Jim Mlodgenski, Hannu Krosing

Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect Exam Ref SC-100. Get certified with ease while learning how to develop highly effective cybersecurity strategies

Dwayne Natwick, Rod Trent

Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect Exam Ref SC-100 is a comprehensive guide that will help cybersecurity professionals design and evaluate the cybersecurity architecture of Microsoft cloud services. Complete with hands-on tutorials, projects, and self-assessment questions, you’ll have everything you need to pass the SC-100 exam.This book will take you through designing a strategy for a cybersecurity architecture and evaluating the governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) of the architecture. This will include cloud-only and hybrid infrastructures, where you’ll learn how to protect using the principles of zero trust, along with evaluating security operations and the overall security posture. To make sure that you are able to take the SC-100 exam with confidence, the last chapter of this book will let you test your knowledge with a mock exam and practice questions.By the end of this book, you’ll have the knowledge you need to plan, design, and evaluate cybersecurity for Microsoft cloud and hybrid infrastructures, and pass the SC-100 exam with flying colors.

AI-Powered Commerce. Building the products and services of the future with Commerce.AI

Andy Pandharikar, Frederik Bussler

Commerce.AI is a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, trained on over a trillion data points, to help businesses build next-gen products and services. If you want to be the best business on the block, using AI is a must.Developers and analysts working with AI will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide. You'll begin by learning the core themes of new product and service innovation, including how to identify market opportunities, come up with ideas, and predict trends. With plenty of use cases as reference, you'll learn how to apply AI for innovation, both programmatically and with Commerce.AI. You'll also find out how to analyze product and service data with tools such as GPT-J, Python pandas, Prophet, and TextBlob. As you progress, you'll explore the evolution of commerce in AI, including how top businesses today are using AI. You'll learn how Commerce.AI merges machine learning, product expertise, and big data to help businesses make more accurate decisions. Finally, you'll use the Commerce.AI suite for product ideation and analyzing market trends.By the end of this artificial intelligence audiobook, you'll be able to strategize new product opportunities by using AI, and also have an understanding of how to use Commerce.AI for product ideation, trend analysis, and predictions.

Building Data Science Applications with FastAPI. Develop, manage, and deploy efficient machine learning applications with Python - Second Edition

François Voron

Building Data Science Applications with FastAPI is the go-to resource for creating efficient and dependable data science API backends. This second edition incorporates the latest Python and FastAPI advancements, along with two new AI projects – a real-time object detection system and a text-to-image generation platform using Stable Diffusion. The book starts with the basics of FastAPI and modern Python programming. You'll grasp FastAPI's robust dependency injection system, which facilitates seamless database communication, authentication implementation, and ML model integration. As you progress, you'll learn testing and deployment best practices, guaranteeing high-quality, resilient applications. Throughout the book, you'll build data science applications using FastAPI with the help of projects covering common AI use cases, such as object detection and text-to-image generation. These hands-on experiences will deepen your understanding of using FastAPI in real-world scenarios. By the end of this book, you'll be well equipped to maintain, design, and monitor applications to meet the highest programming standards using FastAPI, empowering you to create fast and reliable data science API backends with ease while keeping up with the latest advancements.