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.

Hands-On Web Scraping with Python. Extract quality data from the web using effective Python techniques - Second Edition

Anish Chapagain

Web scraping is a powerful tool for extracting data from the web, but it can be daunting for those without a technical background. Designed for novices, this book will help you grasp the fundamentals of web scraping and Python programming, even if you have no prior experience.Adopting a practical, hands-on approach, this updated edition of Hands-On Web Scraping with Python uses real-world examples and exercises to explain key concepts. Starting with an introduction to web scraping fundamentals and Python programming, you’ll cover a range of scraping techniques, including requests, lxml, pyquery, Scrapy, and Beautiful Soup. You’ll also get to grips with advanced topics such as secure web handling, web APIs, Selenium for web scraping, PDF extraction, regex, data analysis, EDA reports, visualization, and machine learning.This book emphasizes the importance of learning by doing. Each chapter integrates examples that demonstrate practical techniques and related skills. By the end of this book, you’ll be equipped with the skills to extract data from websites, a solid understanding of web scraping and Python programming, and the confidence to use these skills in your projects for analysis, visualization, and information discovery.

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

Windows Server 2022 Administration Fundamentals. A beginner's guide to managing and administering Windows Server environments - Third Edition

Bekim Dauti

This third edition gets you up and running with Windows Server 2022, Microsoft's new server operating system, as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems, developed concurrently with Windows 10, version 21H2.The book begins by introducing computer networking and Windows Server concepts, gradually moving towards Windows Server 2022. With the help of step-by-step instructions and easy-to-understand graphics, you’ll become well versed with the roles, features, and functionalities of Windows Server 2022. Topics such as the installation process, upgrades, post-installation tasks, and initial server configuration are covered in detail. As you make progress, you’ll explore roles, features, and role services such as Active Directory, DNS, Hyper-V, remote access, storage, and printers, among others. The book then takes you through maintenance and troubleshooting tasks to guide you in efficiently managing Windows Server 2022. Finally, by working with numerous questions in each chapter and detailed answers at the end, you can test your understanding of the concepts covered.By the end of this Windows Server book, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge needed to update, maintain, and troubleshoot servers to ensure business continuity by relying on best practices and using step-by-step graphic-driven examples.

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

Joseph Babcock, Raghav Bali

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.

Entity Framework Tutorial. A comprehensive guide to the Entity Framework with insight into its latest features and optimizations for responsive data access in your projects - Second Edition

Joydip Kanjilal

The ADO.NET Entity Framework from Microsoft is a new ADO.NET development framework that provides a level of abstraction for data access strategies and solves the impedance mismatch issues that exist between different data modelsThis book explores Microsoft’s Entity Framework and explains how it can used to build enterprise level applications. It will also teach you how you can work with RESTful Services and Google’s Protocol Buffers with Entity Framework and WCF. You will explore how to use Entity Framework with ASP.NET Web API and also how to consume the data exposed by Entity Framework from client applications of varying types, i.e., ASP.NET MVC, WPF and Silverlight. You will familiarize yourself with the new features and improvements introduced in Entity Framework including enhanced POCO support, template-based code generation, tooling consolidation and connection resiliency. By the end of the book, you will be able to successfully extend the new functionalities of Entity framework into your project.

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

Aristeidis Bampakos, Pablo Deeleman

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.

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

Jarred Capellman

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

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

Peter J. Langley, Antonio Santiago Perez

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

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.

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

Ben Auffarth

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

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

Pranai Nandan, Surendra Mohan

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

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

Rick Boyer

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

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

Kirthi Raman, Sebastian Cheung, Kirthi Venkatraman

Adversarial AI Attacks, Mitigations, and Defense Strategies. A cybersecurity professional's guide to AI attacks, threat modeling, and securing AI with MLSecOps

John Sotiropoulos

Adversarial attacks trick AI systems with malicious data, creating new security risks by exploiting how AI learns. This challenges cybersecurity as it forces us to defend against a whole new kind of threat. This book demystifies adversarial attacks and equips you with the skills to secure AI technologies, moving beyond research hype or business-as-usual activities.This strategy-based book is a comprehensive guide to AI security, presenting you with a structured approach with practical examples to identify and counter adversarial attacks. In Part 1, you’ll touch on getting started with AI and learn about adversarial attacks, before Parts 2, 3 and 4 move through different adversarial attack methods, exploring how each type of attack is performed and how you can defend your AI system against it. Part 5 is dedicated to introducing secure-by-design AI strategy, including threat modeling and MLSecOps and consolidating recent research, industry standards and taxonomies such as OWASP and NIST. Finally, based on the classic NIST pillars, the book provides a blueprint for maturing enterprise AI security, discussing the role of AI security in safety and ethics as part of Trustworthy AI.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to develop, deploy, and secure AI systems against the threat of adversarial attacks effectively.

PHP 7 Programming Blueprints. Rethink PHP

Jose Palala, Martin Helmich

When it comes to modern web development, performance is everything. The latest version of PHP has been improvised and updated to make it easier to build for performance, improved engine execution, better memory usage, and a new and extended set of tools. If you’re a web developer, what’s not to love? This guide will show you how to make full use of PHP 7 with a range of practical projects that will not only teach you the principles, but also show you how to put them into practice. It will push and extend your skills, helping you to become a more confident and fluent PHP developer.You’ll find out how to build a social newsletter service, a simple blog with a search capability using Elasticsearch, as well as a chat application. We’ll also show you how to create a RESTful web service, a database class to manage a shopping cart on an e-commerce site and how to build an asynchronous microservice architecture. With further guidance on using reactive extensions in PHP, we’re sure that you’ll find everything you need to take full advantage of PHP 7. So dive in now!

3D Deep Learning with Python. Design and develop your computer vision model with 3D data using PyTorch3D and more

Xudong Ma, Vishakh Hegde, Lilit Yolyan

With this hands-on guide to 3D deep learning, developers working with 3D computer vision will be able to put their knowledge to work and get up and running in no time.Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples, this book lets you explore and gain a thorough understanding of state-of-the-art 3D deep learning. You’ll see how to use PyTorch3D for basic 3D mesh and point cloud data processing, including loading and saving ply and obj files, projecting 3D points into camera coordination using perspective camera models or orthographic camera models, rendering point clouds and meshes to images, and much more. As you implement some of the latest 3D deep learning algorithms, such as differential rendering, Nerf, synsin, and mesh RCNN, you’ll realize how coding for these deep learning models becomes easier using the PyTorch3D library.By the end of this deep learning book, you’ll be ready to implement your own 3D deep learning models confidently.