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.

VMware vSphere 5.5 Cookbook. A task-oriented guide with over 150 practical recipes to install, configure, and manage VMware vSphere components

Abhilash G B

Extending Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Cookbook. This is a brilliantly accessible book, packed with practical examples, that's perfect for business professionals who want to make more of the advanced features of Dynamics AX to save money and increase management efficiency

Murray Fife

Dynamics AX is built on a number of foundation products from Microsoft that are used to make it bigger, better, and stronger than the average business system. Taking advantage of these products will make your life easier. Use these tools to maximize the efficiency of your business management, taking advantage of a powerful and centralized tool set.Extending Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Cookbook will show you how to use tools that you already have to extend out Dynamics AX and discover potential new directions. You will be surprised at what you can do on a shoestring budget. The book will allow you to streamline your work processes, and use the system's powerful and centralised features to the advantage of your organization.Extending Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Cookbook will show you how to maximize the potential of Dynamics AX with common and popular tools to enhance your business management systems. We will begin by exploring how to extend Dynamics AX out with SharePoint. After this, the book will guide you through important elements in maximizing business management efficiency, focusing on key aspects like reports, dashboards, and workflows. The book will then finish by teaching you how to customize your management systems, achieving a comprehensive coverage of the most important extension processes relevant to you and your business with very little programming.This is a book for those of you that want to make the most out of Dynamics AX by using what you already have, and without breaking the bank.

Building a Recommendation System with R. Learn the art of building robust and powerful recommendation engines using R

SURESH K GORAKALA, Michele Usuelli, Suresh Kumar Gorakala

Automotive Cybersecurity Engineering Handbook. The automotive engineer's roadmap to cyber-resilient vehicles

Dr. Ahmad MK Nasser

Replete with exciting challenges, automotive cybersecurity is an emerging domain, and cybersecurity is a foundational enabler for current and future connected vehicle features. This book addresses the severe talent shortage faced by the industry in meeting the demand for building cyber-resilient systems by consolidating practical topics on securing automotive systems to help automotive engineers gain a competitive edge.The book begins by exploring present and future automotive vehicle architectures, along with relevant threats and the skills essential to addressing them. You’ll then explore cybersecurity engineering methods, focusing on compliance with existing automotive standards while making the process advantageous. The chapters are designed in a way to help you with both the theory and practice of building secure systems while considering the cost, time, and resource limitations of automotive engineering. The concluding chapters take a practical approach to threat modeling automotive systems and teach you how to implement security controls across different vehicle architecture layers.By the end of this book, you'll have learned effective methods of handling cybersecurity risks in any automotive product, from single libraries to entire vehicle architectures.

VMware ThinApp 4.7 Essentials. Learn how to quickly and efficiently virtualize your applications with ThinApp 4.7 with this book and

Peter Bjork

VMware ThinApp 4.7 is an application virtualization and portable application creator which allows users to package conventional applications so that they are portable.VMware ThinApp 4.7 Essentials shows you how to deploy ThinApp packages in order to improve the portability, manageability and compatibility of applications by encapsulating them from the underlying operating system on which they are executed.Application virtualization improves the portability, manageability and compatibility of applications by encapsulating them from the underlying operating system on which they are executed.VMware ThinApp 4.7 is an application virtualization and portable application creator which allows users to package conventional applications so that they are portable. ThinApp eliminates application conflicts, reducing the need and cost of recoding and regression testing.In this book you will learn about how application virtualization works and how to deploy ThinApp packages. You will learn how to update and tweak ThinApp Projects before distribution. This book will then cover design and implementation considerations for future ThinApp projects.

Oracle E-Business Suite R12.x HRMS - A Functionality Guide. Design, implement, and build an entire end-to-end HR management infrastructure with Oracle E-Business Suite

Pravin S Ingawale

Svelte 3 Up and Running. A fast-paced introductory guide to building high-performance web applications with SvelteJS

Alessandro Segala

Svelte is a modern JavaScript framework used to build static web apps that are fast and lean, as well as being fun for developers to use. This book is a concise and practical introduction for those who are new to the Svelte framework which will have you up to speed with building apps quickly, and teach you how to use Svelte 3 to build apps that offer a great app user experience (UX).The book starts with an introduction to Svelte 3, before showing you how to set up your first complete application with the framework. Filled with code samples, each chapter will show you how to write components using the Svelte template syntax and the application programming interfaces (APIs) of the Svelte framework. As you advance, you’ll go from scaffolding your project and tool setup all the way through to production with DevOps principles such as automated testing, continuous integration, and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Finally, you’ll deploy your application in the cloud with object storage services and a content delivery network (CDN) for best-in-class performance for your users.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to build and deploy apps using Svelte 3 to solve real-world problems and deliver impressive results.

Optimizing Salesforce Industries Solutions on the Vlocity OmniStudio Platform. Implementing OmniStudio best practices for achieving maximum performance

Dmitri Khanine

Salesforce Industries brings out-of-the-box solutions tailored to specific industries, making it easy for customers to install, configure, and slash their time-to-value. It stands as one of Salesforce's strategic pillars with the number of installations growing rapidly.While customizing the out-of-the-box solutions can pose performance challenges, this book provides a fail-safe system with proven best practices, tools, and precise metrics to enhance performance and scalability for efficient outcomes.Kicking off with an overview of the Salesforce Industries Vlocity platform and OmniStudio, you’ll explore the tools and techniques used to manage code and measure performance. Delving into performance optimization, you’ll uncover methods for improving performance in OmniStudio's Service Layer (Integration Procedures and DataRaptors) and Presentation Layer (OmniScripts and FlexCards). Further, the book will guide you through achieving maximum performance by leveraging best practices in both layers.By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the intricacies of Salesforce Industries on the Vlocity OmniStudio Platform, enhancing your skills to navigate and optimize tailored solutions effectively.

Hands-On Simulation Modeling with Python. Develop simulation models for improved efficiency and precision in the decision-making process - Second Edition

Giuseppe Ciaburro

Simulation modelling is an exploration method that aims to imitate physical systems in a virtual environment and retrieve useful statistical inferences from it. The ability to analyze the model as it runs sets simulation modelling apart from other methods used in conventional analyses. This book is your comprehensive and hands-on guide to understanding various computational statistical simulations using Python. The book begins by helping you get familiarized with the fundamental concepts of simulation modelling, that’ll enable you to understand the various methods and techniques needed to explore complex topics. Data scientists working with simulation models will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide. As you advance, you’ll dive deep into numerical simulation algorithms, including an overview of relevant applications, with the help of real-world use cases and practical examples. You'll also find out how to use Python to develop simulation models and how to use several Python packages. Finally, you’ll get to grips with various numerical simulation algorithms and concepts, such as Markov Decision Processes, Monte Carlo methods, and bootstrapping techniques.By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to construct and deploy simulation models of your own to overcome real-world challenges.

The Future of Finance with ChatGPT and Power BI. Transform your trading, investing, and financial reporting with ChatGPT and Power BI

James Bryant, Aloke Mukherjee

In today's rapidly evolving economic landscape, the combination of finance, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) heralds a new era of decision-making. Finance and data analytics along with AI can no longer be seen as separate disciplines and professionals have to be comfortable in both in order to be successful. This book combines finance concepts, visualizations through Power BI and the application of AI and ChatGPT to provide a more holistic perspective.After a brief introduction to finance and Power BI, you will begin with Tesla's data-driven financial tactics before moving to John Deere's AgTech strides, all through the lens of AI. Salesforce's adaptation to the AI revolution offers profound insights, while Moderna's navigation through the biotech frontier during the pandemic showcases the agility of AI-focused companies. Learn from Silicon Valley Bank's demise, and prepare for CrowdStrike's defensive maneuvers against cyber threats. With each chapter, you'll gain mastery over new investing ideas, Power BI tools, and integrate ChatGPT into your workflows.This book is an indispensable ally for anyone looking to thrive in the financial sector. By the end of this book, you'll be able to transform your approach to investing and trading by blending AI-driven analysis, data visualization, and real-world applications.

ASP.NET MVC 2 Cookbook. Over 70 clear and incredibly effective recipes to get the most out of the many tools and features of ASP.NET MVC framework

Andrew Siemer, Richard Kimber, Richard J Kimber

ASP.NET MVC, one of the latest web development platforms from Microsoft, brings the power of MVC programming to ASP.NET development. It simplifies the task of application development and maintenance for developers. However, ASP.NET MVC is filled with so many features that developers end up looking for solutions to the many problems that are encountered in their routine development tasks.ASP.NET MVC 2 Cookbook will provide solutions for the very specific problems that are encountered while developing applications with the ASP.NET MVC platform. It consists of many recipes containing step-by-step instructions that guide developers to effectively use the wide array of tools and features of ASP.NET MVC platform for web development ASP.NET MVC Cookbook is a collection of recipes that will help you to perform your routine development tasks with ease using the ASP.NET MVC platform. In this book you will be walked through the solution to several specific web application development problems. Each recipe will walk you through the creation of a web application, setting up any Visual Studio project requirements, adding in any external tools, and finally the programming steps needed to solve the problem. The focus of the book is to describe the solution from start to finish.The book starts off with recipes that demonstrate how to work effectively with views and controllers – two of the most important ingredients of the ASP.NET MVC framework. It then gradually moves on to cover many advanced routing techniques. Considering the importance of having a consistent structure to the site, the book contains recipes to show how to build a consistent UI and control its look with master pages. It also contains a chapter that is packed with many recipes that demonstrate how to gain control of data within a view.As the book progresses through some exciting recipes on performing complex tasks with forms, you will discover how easy it is to work with forms to jazz up the look of your web site. Building large applications with ease is one of the prime features of the MVC model. Therefore, this book also focuses on tools and features that make building large applications easier to manage. As data plays an important role in the MVC architecture, there are ample recipes dedicated to cover data validation, access, and storage techniques. Finally, the book demonstrates how to enhance the user experience of your visitors by controlling the data at the application, session, caching, and cookie level.By the end of this book, you will have explored a wide array of tools and features available with the ASP.NET MVC platform

Godot 4 Game Development Projects. Build five cross-platform 2D and 3D games using one of the most powerful open source game engines - Second Edition

Chris Bradfield

Godot 4.0 is one of the most sought-after open-source game engines, and if you’re enthusiastic about exploring its features, then this book is for you. Written by an author with over twenty-five years of experience, the Godot 4 Game Development Projects introduces the Godot game engine and its feature-rich 4.0 version. With an array of new capabilities, Godot 4.0 is a strong alternative to expensive commercial game engines. If you’re a beginner, this book will help you learn game development techniques, while experienced developers will understand how to use this powerful and customizable tool to bring their creative visions to life.This updated edition consists of five projects with an emphasis on the 3D capabilities of the engine that will help you build on your foundation-level skills through small-scale game projects. Along the way, you’ll gain insights into Godot’s inner workings and discover game development techniques that you can apply to your projects.Using a step-by-step approach and practical examples, this book covers everything from the absolute basics to sophisticated game physics, animations, and much more. By the time you complete the final project, you’ll have a strong foundation for future success with Godot 4.0 and you’ll be well on your way to developing a variety of games.

Mastering the Art of Sales Engineering. Develop essential skills and gain valuable insights for high-tech sales engineering success

Jeffrey Silver, Jason Mar-Tang, Michael Huckaby

Sales engineers often need to balance their technical expertise with the soft skills needed to close deals and build lasting client relationships. This book provides a framework for both senior engineers seeking professional growth and individuals just starting their sales engineering careers. This book draws from the authors’ extensive experience in this industry and as leaders in top high-tech companies, offering real-world insights and life lessons applicable to this specialized and in-demand industry. You’ll pick up the core disciplines a successful sales engineer should exemplify, along with mastering practical, day-to-day operational aspects. Within these chapters, you will learn the roles and responsibilities of a sales engineer, as well as adjacent roles within a sales team. You’ll also develop the skills needed to navigate complex sales cycles and exceed traditional expectations. This book covers various key aspects of sales engineering, including mastering communication techniques, navigating complex meetings, managing customer expectations, understanding legal matters, and handling administrative tasks. By the end of this book, you’ll have acquired advanced knowledge to excel as a world-class sales engineer and become a valuable member of your organization’s broader team.

Advertising on Google: The High Performance Cookbook. Cracking pay-per-click on Google can increase your visitor numbers and profits. Here are over 120 practical recipes to help you set up, optimize and manage your Adwords campaign with step-by-step instructions

Kristina Cutura

Generative AI with Python and TensorFlow 2. Create images, text, and music with VAEs, GANs, LSTMs, Transformer models

Machines are excelling at creative human skills such as painting, writing, and composing music. Could you be more creative than generative AI?In this book, you’ll explore the evolution of generative models, from restricted Boltzmann machines and deep belief networks to VAEs and GANs. You’ll learn how to implement models yourself in TensorFlow and get to grips with the latest research on deep neural networks.There’s been an explosion in potential use cases for generative models. You’ll look at Open AI’s news generator, deepfakes, and training deep learning agents to navigate a simulated environment.Recreate the code that’s under the hood and uncover surprising links between text, image, and music generation.

Splunk Developer's Guide. Design, implement, and publish custom Splunk applications and add-ons following best practices

Kyle Smith

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

Learning Angular. A no-nonsense beginner's guide to building web applications with Angular 10 and TypeScript - Third Edition

Angular, loved by millions of web developers around the world, continues to be one of the top JavaScript frameworks thanks to its regular updates and new features that enable fast, cross-platform, and secure frontend web development. With Angular, you can achieve high performance using the latest web techniques and extensive integration with web tools and integrated development environments (IDEs).Updated to Angular 10, this third edition of the Learning Angular book covers new features and modern web development practices to address the current frontend web development landscape. If you are new to Angular, this book will give you a comprehensive introduction to help you get you up and running in no time. You'll learn how to develop apps by harnessing the power of the Angular command-line interface (CLI), write unit tests, style your apps by following the Material Design guidelines, and finally deploy them to a hosting provider. The book is especially useful for beginners to get to grips with the bare bones of the framework needed to start developing Angular apps.By the end of this book, you’ll not only be able to create Angular applications with TypeScript from scratch but also enhance your coding skills with best practices.

Zenoss Core 3.x Network and System Monitoring. A step-by-step guide to configuring, using, and adapting this free Open Source network monitoring system

Michael Badger

For system administrators, network engineers, and security analysts, it is essential to keep a track of network traffic.Zenoss Core is an enterprise-level systems and network monitoring solution that can be as complex as you need it to be. And while just about anyone can install it, turn it on, and monitor something, Zenoss Core has a complicated interface packed with features. The interface has been drastically improved over version 2, but it's still not the type of software you can use intuitively – in other words, a bit of guidance is in order.The role of this book is to serve as your Zenoss Core tour guide and save you hours, days, maybe weeks of time.This book will show you how to work with Zenoss and effectively adapt Zenoss for System and Network monitoring. Starting with the Zenoss basics, it requires no existing knowledge of systems management, and whether or not you can recite MIB trees and OIDs from memory is irrelevant. Advanced users will be able to identify ways in which they can customize the system to do more, while less advanced users will appreciate the ease of use Zenoss provides. The book contains step-by-step examples to demonstrate Zenoss Core's capabilities. The best approach to using this book is to sit down with Zenoss and apply the examples found in these pages to your system.The book covers the monitoring basics: adding devices, monitoring for availability and performance, processing events, and reviewing reports. It also dives into more advanced customizations, such as custom device reports, external event handling (for example, syslog server, zensendevent, and Windows Event Logs), custom monitoring templates using SNMP data sources, along with Nagios, and Cacti plugins. An example of a Nagios-style plugin is included and the book shows you where to get an example of a Cacti-compatible plugin for use as a command data source in monitoring templates. In Zenoss Core, ZenPacks are modules that add monitoring functionality. Using the Nagios plugin example, you will learn how to create, package, and distribute a ZenPack. You also learn how to explore Zenoss Core's data model using zendmd so that you can more effectively write event transformations and custom device reports.

Becoming a PMP(R) Certified Professional. A study guide to mastering project management for the PMP® exam

J. Ashley Hunt

One of the five most prestigious certifications in the world, the PMP® exam is said to be the most difficult non-technical certification exam. With this exam guide, you'll be able to address the challenges in learning advanced project management concepts.This PMP study guide covers all of the 10 project management knowledge areas, 5 process groups, 49 processes, and aspects of the Agile Practice Guide that you need to tailor your projects. With this book, you will understand the best practices found in the sixth edition of the PMBOK® Guide and the newly updated exam content outline. Throughout the book, you'll learn exam objectives in the form of a project for better understanding and effective implementation of real-world project management tasks, helping you to not only prepare for the exam but also implement project management best practices. Finally, you'll get to grips with the entire application and testing processes in PMP® and discover numerous tips and techniques for passing the exam on your first attempt.By the end of this PMP® exam prep book, you'll have a solid understanding of everything you need to pass the PMP® certification exam, and be able to use this handy, on-the-job desktop reference guide to overcome challenges in project management.

Unity 2020 Mobile Game Development. Discover practical techniques and examples to create and deliver engaging games for Android and iOS - Second Edition

John P. Doran

Unity 2020 brings a lot of new features that can be harnessed for building powerful games for popular mobile platforms. This updated second edition delves into Unity development, covering the new features of Unity, modern development practices, and augmented reality (AR) for creating an immersive mobile experience. The book takes a step-by-step approach to building an endless runner game using Unity to help you learn the concepts of mobile game development.This new edition also covers AR features and explains how to implement them using ARCore and ARKit with Unity. The book explores the new mobile notification package and helps you add notifications for your games. You’ll learn how to add touch gestures and design UI elements that can be used in both landscape and portrait modes at different resolutions. The book then covers the best ways to monetize your games using Unity Ads and in-app purchases before you learn how to integrate your game with various social networks. Next, using Unity’s analytics tools, you’ll enhance your game by gaining insights into how players like and use your game. Finally, you’ll take your games into the real world by implementing AR capabilities and publishing them on both Android and iOS app stores.By the end of this book, you will have learned Unity tools and techniques and be able to use them to build robust cross-platform mobile games.

Automate It with Zapier and Generative AI. Harness the power of no-code workflow automation and AI with Zapier to increase business productivity - Second Edition

Organizations experience significant issues with productivity when dealing with manual and repetitive tasks. Automate it with Zapier, Second edition has been extensively revised on how to analyze your processes and identify repetitive tasks that can be automated between 6000+ cloud-based business applications.It includes all of the newest features in Zapier such as AI functionality using the ChatGPT plugin, drafts, reordering and duplicating steps and paths, sub-folders and version history, as well as built-in apps such as Looping, Sub-Zap, Interfaces, Tables, Transfer, and provides more examples covering a variety of use cases sourced from the Zapier user community.You'll learn how to implement automation in your organization along with its important principles, terminology, and first steps of how to use Zapier. Progressively, you'll learn how to use Zapier’s native functionality and all 27 built-in apps such as Filter, Paths, Formatter, Digest, and Scheduler, to enable you to build multi-step Zaps. You will also discover how to manage your Zapier account effectively, as well as how to troubleshoot technical problems with your workflows, and use the OpenAI integration to automate AI tasks.By the end of this book, you'll be able to automate your manual and repetitive tasks using Zapier depicted through real-life examples.

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.