Mastering Adobe Photoshop Elements 2022. Boost your image-editing skills using the latest Adobe Photoshop Elements tools and techniques - Fourth Edition

Robin Nichols

Managing thousands of images while producing perfectly edited results has now become a must-have skill for bloggers, influencers, all social media users, and photography enthusiasts.Photoshop Elements 2022 has all the right tools to help you manage your growing multimedia assets and significantly boost your creative output.This fourth edition is updated with Elements 2022's latest features, including Adobe's AI-powered tools that perfectly complement its entire creative workflow. Each chapter is designed to help you get the most from your image files in a simple, easy-to-follow way. You'll find out how to add significant visual improvements to your projects using brilliant AI-driven single-click edits or through more complex manual adjustments, all depending on your skill level and requirements. The book is packed with clear instructions to guide you effortlessly through the hundreds of processes, tools, and features in Photoshop Elements 2022. You'll cover everything from developing your organizational skills through to creating remarkable images using photos, text, graphics, downloadable content, animation, and a range of fantastic AI-driven features.By the end of this Photoshop Elements book, you'll have learned how to leverage the impressive tools available in Photoshop Elements 2022 with confidence.

The Art of Manufacturing. Overcome control challenges for increasing efficiency in manufacturing using real-world examples

Ninad Deshpande, Sivaram Pothukuchi

Engineering disciplines focus mainly on programming control systems, while the challenges they overcome or their industry applications largely go uncovered, leaving a huge gap between the theory and industry practices. This leads to engineers learning about subjects without actually understanding their purpose and entering the industry needing months of training.The Art of Manufacturing cuts across pedantic theory and reaches practical applications. You’ll begin your learning journey by starting from the product and moving backward to the manufacturing landscape, factories, machines, and finally to the automation and control challenges faced in manufacturing. The book builds on the authors’ valuable on-field experience, providing a detailed view of the manufacturing of real-world products, while simultaneously providing various analogies and references to daily tasks. As you advance through the chapters, you’ll work on interesting control problems and find out how to overcome them in applications. The concluding chapters offer you a sneak peek into the future of automation and factories.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to relate a real-world product with an associated control challenge and discover ways to overcome these challenges.

GameSalad Essentials. Create awesome cross-platform games in no time, and with no coding

Miguel DeQuadros

Infrastructure as Code for Beginners. Deploy and manage your cloud-based services with Terraform and Ansible

Russ McKendrick

The Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach ensures consistent and repeatable deployment of cloud-based IaaS/PaaS services, saving you time while delivering impeccable results. Infrastructure as Code for Beginners is a practical implementation guide that helps you gain a clear understanding of the foundations of Infrastructure as Code and make informed decisions when implementing it.With this book, you’ll uncover essential IaC concepts, including planning, selecting, and implementing the right tools for your project. With step-by-step explanations and real-world examples, you'll gain a solid understanding of the benefits of IaC and the scope of application in your projects. You'll learn about the pros, cons, and best practices of different IaC tools such as Terraform and Ansible, and their use at different stages of the deployment process along with GitHub Actions. Using these tools, you'll be able to design, deploy, and secure your infrastructure on two major cloud platforms, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. In addition, you'll explore other IaC tools such as Pulumi, AWS CloudFormation, and Azure Bicep.By the end of this book, you’ll be well equipped to approach your IaC projects confidently.

Mastering WooCommerce. Build, customize, and launch a complete e-commerce website with WooCommerce from scratch - Second Edition

Patrick Rauland

Author Patrick Rauland is a WooCommerce expert with a deep-rooted passion for the platform. Drawing from his multifaceted experience as a customer, WooCommerce support team member, core developer, release leader, and conference planner, he presents the latest edition of this guide to help you master every facet of launching and managing a successful WooCommerce store.From initiation to seamless integration of essential components such as payments, shipping, and tax configurations, this book takes you through the entire process of establishing your online store. You’ll then customize your store's visual identity, optimizing for search engines and advanced sales management through Point of Sale (POS) systems, outsourced fulfillment solutions, and external reporting services.You’ll then advance to enhancing the user experience, streamlining reorders, and simplifying the checkout process for your customers. With this new edition, you’ll also gain insights into secure hosting and bug fixing and be prepared for updates. That’s not all; you’ll build a promotional landing page, ensure store safety, contribute to the WooCommerce community, and design custom plugins for your unique needs.By the end of this WooCommerce book, you'll emerge with the skills to run a complete WooCommerce store and customize every aspect of the store on the frontend as well as backend.

Gamification for Product Excellence. Make your product stand out with higher user engagement, retention, and innovation

Mike Hyzy, Bret Wardle, Gabe Zichermann

Are you trying to build a product that your audience loves to use? Game mechanics and psychology have been used for decades to increase engagement, convert users to buyers, and increase audience retention. Learning when and where to implement these tools can take your product from the middle of the pack to a must-have!This book begins by helping you get a clear understanding of gamification, its key concepts, and how product managers can leverage it to drive user engagement in non-game scenarios. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll learn different gamification frameworks, mechanics, and elements with structured ways to implement them while designing a successful gamification strategy tailored to a business case. You'll get a chance to implement and test the designed strategy prototype with the users for feedback. You’ll also discover how to sell your strategy to stakeholders to get full buy-in from the top down, along with how to gamify your product development process to drive innovation, engagement, and motivation.By the end of this book, you'll be primed to harness the power of gamification, and will have benefited from proven case studies, best practices, and tips, ensuring you are well-equipped to apply gamification principles to your work as a product development professional.

Application Development in iOS 7

Kyle Begeman

Learning Unreal Engine iOS Game Development. Explore the powerful features of UE4 and build a complete Unreal game with this accessible and practical iOS game development guide

Muhammad A.Moniem

Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook. Solve real-world Magento sales problems with a collection of simple but effective recipes

Roy Rubin, William Rice, William Rice

Magento is a feature-rich, professional open source e-commerce solution that offers users complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Although Magento provides users with the power to create dynamic e-commerce sites, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and create sites that are tailored to your unique business needs.This book gives you a hands-on experience on Magento, helping you increase your revenue by implementing proven sales tactics on your Magento site.This book contains techniques to help you with each stage of selling to your customers: attracting visitors, driving them to your product pages, making the sale, increasing sales, engaging your customers, and more. It contains a powerful mix of techniques for increasing sales in your online storefront. Over thirty of the techniques are short and stand alone. A few are designed to be used together, such as the seven techniques in the chapter on creating an international storefront. Some techniques make creative use of Magento’s standard features. A few techniques combine Magento with other tools, such as social networking sites. All the techniques are explained in clear, step-by-step directions, with many screenshots. The book uses an example site for each technique, so that you can see exactly how it will affect your storefront. You can jump into the book at any point, or, work through it from beginning to end.

Mastering Adobe Captivate 6. Take your e-learning content to the next level with this fantastic guide to mastering Adobe Captivate. You\'ll learn by completing three sample projects that cover everything. If you can use Windows or Mac you can do this course

Damien Bruyndonckx

Adobe Captivate is the industry-leading solution for authoring E-learning content. With adobe Captivate one can capture the on-screen action, enhance e-Learning projects, insert SCORM and AICC-compliant quizzes and then, publish your work in various formats for easy deployment on virtually any desktop and mobile device. Mastering Adobe Captivate 6 is a comprehensive guide to creating SCORM-compliant demonstrations, simulations and quizzes with Adobe Captivate. The sample projects demonstrate each and every feature of Adobe Captivate giving you the expertise you need to create and deploy your own professionalquality e-learning courses. Mastering Adobe Captivate 6 will guide you through the creation of three e-learning projects including a demonstration, a simulation and a SCORM-compliant quiz. The first part of the book will drive you through the main three steps of the Captivate production process. In the first step, we will use the powerful capture engine of Captivate to generate the needed slides and screenshots. In the second step, we will enhance our slides and screenshots using the objects provided by Captivate. These objects include animations, interactions, videos and more. In the third step, we will make our project available to the outside world by publishing it in various formats including Adobe Flash PDF, video, and even HTML 5. The second part of the book will focus on the advanced tools of Captivate. These tools include the questions slides that make up a quiz, SCORM and AICC compliance, localization of your e-Learning content and widgets among others. In the last chapter, you we will unleash the true power of Captivate by using the variables and the advanced actions to create a unique e-Learning experience.

BeagleBone Black Cookbook. Over 60 recipes and solutions for inventors, makers, and budding engineers to create projects using the BeagleBone Black

Charles A. Hamilton, Jason Kridner

There are many single-board controllers and computers such as Arduino, Udoo, or Raspberry Pi, which can be used to create electronic prototypes on circuit boards. However, when it comes to creating more advanced projects, BeagleBone Black provides a sophisticated alternative. Mastering the BeagleBone Black enables you to combine it with sensors and LEDs, add buttons, and marry it to a variety of add-on boards. You can transform this tiny device into the brain for an embedded application or an endless variety of electronic inventions and prototypes.With dozens of how-tos, this book kicks off with the basic steps for setting up and running the BeagleBone Black for the first time, from connecting the necessary hardware and using the command line with Linux commands to installing new software and controlling your system remotely. Following these recipes, more advanced examples take you through scripting, debugging, and working with software source files, eventually working with the Linux kernel. Subsequently, you will learn how to exploit the board's real-time functions. We will then discover exciting methods for using sound and video with the system before marching forward into an exploration of recipes for building Internet of Things projects. Finally, the book finishes with a dramatic arc upward into outer space, when you explore ways to build projects for tracking and monitoring satellites.

Machine Learning for Data Mining. Improve your data mining capabilities with advanced predictive modeling

Jesus Salcedo

Machine learning (ML) combined with data mining can give you amazing results in your data mining work by empowering you with several ways to look at data. This book will help you improve your data mining techniques by using smart modeling techniques.This book will teach you how to implement ML algorithms and techniques in your data mining work. It will enable you to pair the best algorithms with the right tools and processes. You will learn how to identify patterns and make predictions with minimal human intervention. You will build different types of ML models, such as the neural network, the Support Vector Machines (SVMs), and the Decision tree. You will see how all of these models works and what kind of data in the dataset they are suited for. You will learn how to combine the results of different models in order to improve accuracy. Topics such as removing noise and handling errors will give you an added edge in model building and optimization.By the end of this book, you will be able to build predictive models and extract information of interest from the dataset

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.

Mastering C# and .NET Framework. .NET Under the hood

Marino Posadas

Mastering C# and .NET Framework will take you in to the depths of C# 6.0/7.0 and .NET 4.6, so you can understand how the platform works when it runs your code, and how you can use this knowledge to write efficient applications. Take full advantage of the new revolution in .NET development, including open source status and cross-platform capability, and get to grips with the architectural changes of CoreCLR.Start with how the CLR executes code, and discover the niche and advanced aspects of C# programming – from delegates and generics, through to asynchronous programming. Run through new forms of type declarations and assignments, source code callers, static using syntax, auto-property initializers, dictionary initializers, null conditional operators, and many others. Then unlock the true potential of the .NET platform. Learn how to write OWASP-compliant applications, how to properly implement design patterns in C#, and how to follow the general SOLID principles and its implementations in C# code.We finish by focusing on tips and tricks that you'll need to get the most from C# and .NET.This book also covers .NET Core 1.1 concepts as per the latest RTM release in the last chapter.

Mastering JavaScript Functional Programming. Write clean, robust, and maintainable web and server code using functional JavaScript and TypeScript - Third Edition

Federico Kereki

Functional programming is a programming paradigm that uses functions for developing software. This book is filled with examples that enable you to leverage the latest JavaScript and TypeScript versions to produce modern and clean code, as well as teach you to how apply functional programming techniques to develop more efficient algorithms, write more concise code, and simplify unit testing.This book provides comprehensive coverage of the major topics in functional programming to produce shorter, clearer, and testable programs. You’ll begin by getting to grips with writing and testing pure functions, reducing side effects, as well as other key features to make your applications functional in nature. The book specifically explores techniques to simplify coding, apply recursion, perform high-level coding, learn ways to achieve immutability, implement design patterns, and work with data types.By the end of this book, you’ll have developed the practical programming skills needed to confidently enhance your applications by adding functional programming to wherever it’s most suitable.

BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner's Guide. Master bleeding edge wireless testing techniques with BackTrack 5

Vivek Ramachandran

Wireless has become ubiquitous in today’s world. The mobility and flexibility provided by it makes our lives more comfortable and productive. But this comes at a cost – Wireless technologies are inherently insecure and can be easily broken. BackTrack is a penetration testing and security auditing distribution that comes with a myriad of wireless networking tools used to simulate network attacks and detect security loopholes. Backtrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner’s Guide will take you through the journey of becoming a Wireless hacker. You will learn various wireless testing methodologies taught using live examples, which you will implement throughout this book. The engaging practical sessions very gradually grow in complexity giving you enough time to ramp up before you get to advanced wireless attacks.This book will take you through the basic concepts in Wireless and creating a lab environment for your experiments to the business of different lab sessions in wireless security basics, slowly turn on the heat and move to more complicated scenarios, and finally end your journey by conducting bleeding edge wireless attacks in your lab.There are many interesting and new things that you will learn in this book – War Driving, WLAN packet sniffing, Network Scanning, Circumventing hidden SSIDs and MAC filters, bypassing Shared Authentication, Cracking WEP and WPA/WPA2 encryption, Access Point MAC spoofing, Rogue Devices, Evil Twins, Denial of Service attacks, Viral SSIDs, Honeypot and Hotspot attacks, Caffe Latte WEP Attack, Man-in-the-Middle attacks, Evading Wireless Intrusion Prevention systems and a bunch of other cutting edge wireless attacks.If you were ever curious about what wireless security and hacking was all about, then this book will get you started by providing you with the knowledge and practical know-how to become a wireless hacker.

Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL. BPMN and BPEL - Go from Business Process Modeling to Orchestration and Service Oriented Architecture with this book and

Matjaz B. Juric, Kapil Pant, Matjaz B Juric

Time Series Analysis with Python Cookbook. Practical recipes for exploratory data analysis, data preparation, forecasting, and model evaluation

Tarek A. Atwan

Time series data is everywhere, available at a high frequency and volume. It is complex and can contain noise, irregularities, and multiple patterns, making it crucial to be well-versed with the techniques covered in this book for data preparation, analysis, and forecasting.This book covers practical techniques for working with time series data, starting with ingesting time series data from various sources and formats, whether in private cloud storage, relational databases, non-relational databases, or specialized time series databases such as InfluxDB. Next, you’ll learn strategies for handling missing data, dealing with time zones and custom business days, and detecting anomalies using intuitive statistical methods, followed by more advanced unsupervised ML models. The book will also explore forecasting using classical statistical models such as Holt-Winters, SARIMA, and VAR. The recipes will present practical techniques for handling non-stationary data, using power transforms, ACF and PACF plots, and decomposing time series data with multiple seasonal patterns. Later, you’ll work with ML and DL models using TensorFlow and PyTorch.Finally, you’ll learn how to evaluate, compare, optimize models, and more using the recipes covered in the book.

The Ultimate Guide to Snowpark. Design and deploy Snowflake Snowpark with Python for efficient data workloads

Shankar Narayanan SGS, Vivekanandan SS, Jeff Hollan

Snowpark is a powerful framework that helps you unlock numerous possibilities within the Snowflake Data Cloud. However, without proper guidance, leveraging the full potential of Snowpark with Python can be challenging. Packed with practical examples and code snippets, this book will be your go-to guide to using Snowpark with Python successfully.The Ultimate Guide to Snowpark helps you develop an understanding of Snowflake Snowpark and how it enables you to implement workloads in data engineering, data science, and data applications within the Data Cloud. From configuration and coding styles to workloads such as data manipulation, collection, preparation, transformation, aggregation, and analysis, this guide will equip you with the right knowledge to make the most of this framework. You'll discover how to build, test, and deploy data pipelines and data science models. As you progress, you’ll deploy data applications natively in Snowflake and operate large language models (LLMs) using Snowpark container services.By the end of this book, you'll be able to leverage Snowpark's capabilities and propel your career as a Snowflake developer to new heights.

Strategic Leadership in Responsive Web Design. A tech leader's guide to achieving business excellence by adopting responsive web design

Harley Ferguson

Strategic Leadership in Responsive Web Design is an essential guide that will equip you with the knowledge and foresight needed to navigate the ever-evolving digital landscape.You’ll start by learning about the strategic importance of responsive web design (RWD) before delving into its intricacies. As you progress, you’ll not only discover the technical aspects of adaptive design, but also learn how to seamlessly integrate these principles within your organization’s business objectives. You’ll develop the skills required to integrate RWD principles into broader business goals. Next, you’ll learn how to navigate SEO in modern times while ensuring platforms are consistent in design across devices. Later, this book shows you how to measure the ROI when making RWD decisions, and how to ensure you’re making the right one.By the end of this book, you’ll have understood the role that RWD plays in achieving broad business objectives.

Hands-On Deep Learning Algorithms with Python. Master deep learning algorithms with extensive math by implementing them using TensorFlow

Sudharsan Ravichandiran

Deep learning is one of the most popular domains in the AI space that allows you to develop multi-layered models of varying complexities. This book introduces you to popular deep learning algorithms—from basic to advanced—and shows you how to implement them from scratch using TensorFlow. Throughout the book, you will gain insights into each algorithm, the mathematical principles involved, and how to implement it in the best possible manner. The book starts by explaining how you can build your own neural networks, followed by introducing you to TensorFlow, the powerful Python-based library for machine learning and deep learning. Moving on, you will get up to speed with gradient descent variants, such as NAG, AMSGrad, AdaDelta, Adam, and Nadam. The book will then provide you with insights into recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and LSTM and how to generate song lyrics with RNN. Next, you will master the math necessary to work with convolutional and capsule networks, widely used for image recognition tasks. You will also learn how machines understand the semantics of words and documents using CBOW, skip-gram, and PV-DM. Finally, you will explore GANs, including InfoGAN and LSGAN, and autoencoders, such as contractive autoencoders and VAE. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with all the skills you need to implement deep learning in your own projects.

Asterisk 1.4 - The Professional's Guide. Implementing, Administering, and Consulting on Commercial IP Telephony Solutions

Colman Carpenter, David Duffett, Ian Plain, Nik Middleton, ...

Asterisk is the leading Open Source Telephony application and PBX software solution. It represents an effective, easy-to-administer, and accessible platform for running enterprise telephony requirements. The real world, however, offers numerous hurdles when running Asterisk in the commercial environment including call routing, resilience, or integrating Asterisk with other systems. This book will show you some of the ways to overcome these problems.As the follow-up to Packt's highly successful 2005 title Building Telephony Systems with Asterisk, this book presents the collected wisdom of Asterisk Professionals in the commercial environment.Aimed at Administrators and Asterisk Consultants who are comfortable with the basics of Asterisk operation and installation, this book covers numerous hands-on topics such as Call Routing, Network Considerations, Scalability, and Resilience ñ all the while providing practical solutions and suggestions. It also covers more business-related areas like Billing Solutions and a Winning Sales Technique. Even if your interest or experience with Asterisk is lower level, this book will provide a deeper understanding of how Asterisk operates in the real world.Asterisk is deployed across countless enterprises globally. Running on Linux, it has constantly demonstrated its resilience, stability, and scalability and is now the advanced communication solution of choice to many organizations and consultants.With a foreword from Mark Spencer, the man behind Asterisk, this book presents the accumulated wisdom of three leading Asterisk Consultants and shows the reader how to get the most out of Asterisk in the commercial environment. Over the course of eleven chapters, this book introduces the reader to topics as diverse as Advanced Dial Plans, Network Considerations, and Call Routing, through to Localization, DAHDI, Speech Technology, and Working with a GUI. The book also covers the more nebulous aspects of being an Asterisk professional such as evaluating customer requirements and pitching for contracts.This book represents the wisdom and thoughts of front line consultants. The knowledge they impart will prove informative, thought provoking and be of lasting interest to Asterisk professionals.

OData Programming Cookbook for .NET Developers. 70 fast-track, example-driven recipes with clear instructions and details for OData programming with .NET Framework with this book and

Steven Cheng, Juntao Cheng

Odata (Open Data Protocol) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. OData enables data access among a variety of applications, services, and stores by adopting existing Web technologies such as HTTP, XML, and JSON. This book deals with common OData programming cases over the Microsoft .NET Framework platform and eases the learning curve for a .NET developer to start incorporating OData in data service development.This book provides a collection of recipes that help .NET developers to get familiar with OData programming in a quick and efficient manner. The recipes cover most OData features from the former ADO.NET Data Service to the current WCF Data Service platform. In addition, all the sample cases here are based on real-world scenarios and issues that .NET developers might come across when programming with OData in application development.This book will be your handy guide with basic to advanced walkthroughs of common OData programming cases for the Microsoft .NET Framework platform. You will learn quick solutions to necessary tasks to integrate the power of OData at both server-side and client-side.This book will help you master the use of OData with .NET Framework by taking you through hands-on and practical recipes. It starts by talking about the common means for building OData services and consuming OData services in client applications. Then, some more specific topics like hosting, configuration and security are discussed. The book also covers many popular and interesting topics such as integrating OData in web applications, and developing data-driven mobile applications with OData. Moreover, you can also find quite a few recipes discussing real-world OData producers and new features in latest and future versions.Within OData Programming Cookbook for .NET Developers, all the recipes are selected based on real-world scenarios that you will commonly come across. Each recipe covers a specific topic, going from the description of the problem, through a conceptual solution, to a solution containing sample code. By following these recipes, you can acquire how to program with OData in a simple, effective, and easy manner.

Python Feature Engineering Cookbook. A complete guide to crafting powerful features for your machine learning models - Third Edition

Soledad Galli, Christoph Molnar

Streamline data preprocessing and feature engineering in your machine learning project with this third edition of the Python Feature Engineering Cookbook to make your data preparation more efficient.This guide addresses common challenges, such as imputing missing values and encoding categorical variables using practical solutions and open source Python libraries. You’ll learn advanced techniques for transforming numerical variables, discretizing variables, and dealing with outliers. Each chapter offers step-by-step instructions and real-world examples, helping you understand when and how to apply various transformations for well-prepared data.The book explores feature extraction from complex data types such as dates, times, and text. You’ll see how to create new features through mathematical operations and decision trees and use advanced tools like Featuretools and tsfresh to extract features from relational data and time series.By the end, you’ll be ready to build reproducible feature engineering pipelines that can be easily deployed into production, optimizing data preprocessing workflows and enhancing machine learning model performance.