Moodle 3.x Developer's Guide. Build custom plugins, extensions, modules and more

Ian Wild, Jaswant Tak

The new and revamped Moodle is the top choice for developers to create cutting edge e-learning apps that cater to different user’s segments and are visually appealing as well. This book explains how the Moodle 3.x platform provides a framework that allows developers to create a customized e-learning solution. It begins with an exploration of the different types of plugin.. We then continue with an investigation of creating new courses. You will create a custom plugin that pulls in resources from a third-party repository. Then you’ll learn how users can be assigned to courses and granted the necessary permissions.Furthermore, you will develop a custom user home. At the end of the book, we’ll discuss the Web Services API to fully automate Moodle 3.x in real time.

JavaScript Cloud Native Development Cookbook. Deliver serverless cloud-native solutions on AWS, Azure, and GCP

John Gilbert

Cloud-native development is a modern approach to building and running applications that leverages the merits of the cloud computing model. With cloud-native development, teams can deliver faster and in a more lean and agile manner as compared to traditional approaches. This recipe-based guide provides quick solutions for your cloud-native applications.Beginning with a brief introduction, JavaScript Cloud-Native Development Cookbook guides you in building and deploying serverless, event-driven, cloud-native microservices on AWS with Node.js. You'll then move on to the fundamental patterns of developing autonomous cloud-native services and understand the tools and techniques involved in creating globally scalable, highly available, and resilient cloud-native applications. The book also covers multi-regional deployments and leveraging the edge of the cloud to maximize responsiveness, resilience, and elasticity.In the latter chapters you'll explore techniques for building fully automated, continuous deployment pipelines and gain insights into polyglot cloud-native development on popular cloud platforms such as Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). By the end of the book, you'll be able to apply these skills to build powerful cloud-native solutions.

Docker Quick Start Guide. Learn Docker like a boss, and finally own your applications

Earl Waud

Docker is an open source software platform that helps you with creating, deploying, and running your applications using containers. This book is your ideal introduction to Docker and containerization.You will learn how to set up a Docker development environment on a Linux, Mac, or Windows workstation, and learn your way around all the commands to run and manage your Docker images and containers.You will explore the Dockerfile and learn how to build your own enterprise-grade Docker images. Then you will learn about Docker networks, Docker swarm, and Docker volumes, and how to use these features with Docker stacks in order to define, deploy, and maintain highly-scalable, fault-tolerant multi-container applications.Finally, you will learn how to leverage Docker with Jenkins to automate the building of Docker images and the deployment of Docker containers. By the end of this book, you will be well prepared when it comes to using Docker for your next project.

Enterprise Cloud Security and Governance. Efficiently set data protection and privacy principles

Zeal Vora

Modern day businesses and enterprises are moving to the Cloud, to improve efficiency and speed, achieve flexibility and cost effectiveness, and for on-demand Cloud services. However, enterprise Cloud security remains a major concern because migrating to the public Cloud requires transferring some control over organizational assets to the Cloud provider. There are chances these assets can be mismanaged and therefore, as a Cloud security professional, you need to be armed with techniques to help businesses minimize the risks and misuse of business data.The book starts with the basics of Cloud security and offers an understanding of various policies, governance, and compliance challenges in Cloud. This helps you build a strong foundation before you dive deep into understanding what it takes to design a secured network infrastructure and a well-architected application using various security services in the Cloud environment.Automating security tasks, such as Server Hardening with Ansible, and other automation services, such as Monit, will monitor other security daemons and take the necessary action in case these security daemons are stopped maliciously. In short, this book has everything you need to secure your Cloud environment with. It is your ticket to obtain industry-adopted best practices for developing a secure, highly available, and fault-tolerant architecture for organizations.

Learn Web Development with Python. Get hands-on with Python Programming and Django web development

Fabrizio Romano, Gaston C. Hillar, Arun Ravindran

If you want to develop complete Python web apps with Django, this Learning Path is for you. It will walk you through Python programming techniques and guide you in implementing them when creating 4 professional Django projects, teaching you how to solve common problems and develop RESTful web services with Django and Python. You will learn how to build a blog application, a social image bookmarking website, an online shop, and an e-learning platform.Learn Web Development with Python will get you started with Python programming techniques, show you how to enhance your applications with AJAX, create RESTful APIs, and set up a production environment for your Django projects. Last but not least, you’ll learn the best practices for creating real-world applications.By the end of this Learning Path, you will have a full understanding of how Django works and how to use it to build web applications from scratch.This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products:• Learn Python Programming by Fabrizio Romano• Django RESTful Web Services by Gastón C. Hillar• Django Design Patterns and Best Practices by Arun Ravindran

Cloud Native Architectures. Design high-availability and cost-effective applications for the cloud

Tom Laszewski, Kamal Arora, Erik Farr, Piyum Zonooz

Cloud computing has proven to be the most revolutionary IT development since virtualization. Cloud native architectures give you the benefit of more flexibility over legacy systems. To harness this, businesses need to refresh their development models and architectures when they find they don’t port to the cloud. Cloud Native Architectures demonstrates three essential components of deploying modern cloud native architectures: organizational transformation, deployment modernization, and cloud native architecture patterns.This book starts with a quick introduction to cloud native architectures that are used as a base to define and explain what cloud native architecture is and is not. You will learn what a cloud adoption framework looks like and develop cloud native architectures using microservices and serverless computing as design principles. You’ll then explore the major pillars of cloud native design including scalability, cost optimization, security, and ways to achieve operational excellence. In the concluding chapters, you will also learn about various public cloud architectures ranging from AWS and Azure to the Google Cloud Platform.By the end of this book, you will have learned the techniques to adopt cloud native architectures that meet your business requirements. You will also understand the future trends and expectations of cloud providers.

Scala Reactive Programming. Build scalable, functional reactive microservices with Akka, Play, and Lagom

Rambabu Posa

Reactive programming is a scalable, fast way to build applications, and one that helps us write code that is concise, clear, and readable. It can be used for many purposes such as GUIs, robotics, music, and others, and is central to many concurrent systems. This book will be your guide to getting started with Reactive programming in Scala.You will begin with the fundamental concepts of Reactive programming and gradually move on to working with asynchronous data streams. You will then start building an application using Akka Actors and extend it using the Play framework. You will also learn about reactive stream specifications, event sourcing techniques, and different methods to integrate Akka Streams into the Play Framework. This book will also take you one step forward by showing you the advantages of the Lagom framework while working with reactive microservices. You will also learn to scale applications using multi-node clusters and test, secure, and deploy your microservices to the cloud.By the end of the book, you will have gained the knowledge to build robust and distributed systems with Scala and Akka.

C++ Fundamentals. Hit the ground running with C++, the language that supports tech giants globally

Antonio Mallia, Francesco Zoffoli

C++ Fundamentals begins by introducing you to the C++ compilation model and syntax. You will then study data types, variable declaration, scope, and control flow statements. With the help of this book, you'll be able to compile fully working C++ code and understand how variables, references, and pointers can be used to manipulate the state of the program. Next, you will explore functions and classes — the features that C++ offers to organize a program — and use them to solve more complex problems. You will also understand common pitfalls and modern best practices, especially the ones that diverge from the C++98 guidelines.As you advance through the chapters, you'll study the advantages of generic programming and write your own templates to make generic algorithms that work with any type. This C++ book will guide you in fully exploiting standard containers and algorithms, understanding how to pick the appropriate one for each problem. By the end of this book, you will not only be able to write efficient code but also be equipped to improve the readability, performance, and maintainability of your programs.

Seven NoSQL Databases in a Week. Get up and running with the fundamentals and functionalities of seven of the most popular NoSQL databases

Aaron Ploetz, Devram Kandhare, Sudarshan Kadambi, Xun (Brian) Wu

This is the golden age of open source NoSQL databases. With enterprises having to work with large amounts of unstructured data and moving away from expensive monolithic architecture, the adoption of NoSQL databases is rapidly increasing. Being familiar with the popular NoSQL databases and knowing how to use them is a must for budding DBAs and developers.This book introduces you to the different types of NoSQL databases and gets you started with seven of the most popular NoSQL databases used by enterprises today. We start off with a brief overview of what NoSQL databases are, followed by an explanation of why and when to use them. The book then covers the seven most popular databases in each of these categories: MongoDB, Amazon DynamoDB, Redis, HBase, Cassandra, In?uxDB, and Neo4j. The book doesn't go into too much detail about each database but teachesyou enough to get started with them.By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of the different NoSQL databases and their functionalities, empowering you to select and use the rightdatabase according to your needs.

Building RESTful Web Services with PHP 7. Lumen, Composer, API testing, Microservices, and more

Waheed ud din

REST is the most wide spread and effective standard to develop APIs for internet services. With the way PHP and its eco-system has modernized the way code is written by simplifying various operations, it is useful to develop RESTful APIs with PHP 7 and modern tools.This book explains in detail how to create your own RESTful API in PHP 7 that can be consumed by other users in your organization. Starting with a brief introduction to the fundamentals of REST architecture and the new features in PHP 7, you will learn to implement basic RESTful API endpoints using vanilla PHP. The book explains how to identify flaws in security and design and teach you how to tackle them. You will learn about composer, Lumen framework and how to make your RESTful API cleaner, secure and efficient. The book emphasizes on automated tests, teaches about different testing types and give a brief introduction to microservices which is the natural way forward. After reading this book, you will have a clear understanding of the REST architecture and you can build a web service from scratch.

Puppet 5 Beginner's Guide. Go from newbie to pro with Puppet 5 - Third Edition

John Arundel

Puppet 5 Beginner’s Guide, Third Edition gets you up and running with the very latest features of Puppet 5, including Docker containers, Hiera data, and Amazon AWS cloud orchestration. Go from beginner to confident Puppet user with a series of clear, practical examples to help you manage every aspect of your server setup. Whether you’re a developer, a system administrator, or you are simply curious about Puppet, you’ll learn Puppet skills that you can put into practice right away. With practical steps giving you the key concepts you need, this book teaches you how to install packages and config files, create users, set up scheduled jobs, provision cloud instances, build containers, and so much more. Every example in this book deals with something real and practical that you’re likely to need in your work, and you’ll see the complete Puppet code that makes it happen, along with step-by-step instructions for what to type and what output you’ll see. All the examples are available in a GitHub repo for you to download and adapt for your own server setup.

Server Side development with Node.js and Koa.js Quick Start Guide. Build robust and scalable web applications with modern JavaScript techniques

Olayinka Omole

Every developer wants to build modular and scalable web applications. Modern versions of JavaScript have made this possible in Node.js, and Koa is a Node.js framework that makes it easy. This book is the ideal introduction for JavaScript developers who want to create scalable server side applications using Node.js and Koa.js.The book shows you how Koa can be used to start projects from scratch, register custom and existing middleware, read requests, and send responses to users. We will explore the core concepts in Koa, such as error handling, logging, and request and response handling. We will dive into new concepts in JavaScript development, and see how paradigms such as async/await help with modern Node.js application development.By the end of this book, you will be building robust web applications in Koa using modern development paradigms and techniques of Node.js development.

Learning Google BigQuery. A beginner's guide to mining massive datasets through interactive analysis

Thirukkumaran Haridass, Eric Brown

Google BigQuery is a popular cloud data warehouse for large-scale data analytics. This book will serve as a comprehensive guide to mastering BigQuery, and how you can utilize it to quickly and efficiently get useful insights from your Big Data.You will begin with getting a quick overview of the Google Cloud Platform and the various services it supports. Then, you will be introduced to the Google BigQuery API and how it fits within in the framework of GCP. The book covers useful techniques to migrate your existing data from your enterprise to Google BigQuery, as well as readying and optimizing it for analysis. You will perform basic as well as advanced data querying using BigQuery, and connect the results to various third party tools for reporting and visualization purposes such as R and Tableau. If you're looking to implement real-time reporting of your streaming data running in your enterprise, this book will also help you.This book also provides tips, best practices and mistakes to avoid while working with Google BigQuery and services that interact with it. By the time you're done with it, you will have set a solid foundation in working with BigQuery to solve even the trickiest of data problems.

Internet of Things Programming Projects. Build modern IoT solutions with the Raspberry Pi 3 and Python

Colin Dow

The Internet of Things (IOT) has managed to attract the attention of researchers and tech enthusiasts, since it powerfully combines classical networks with instruments and devices.In Internet of Things Programming Projects, we unleash the power of Raspberry Pi and Python to create engaging projects. In the first part of the book, you’ll be introduced to the Raspberry Pi, learn how to set it up, and then jump right into Python programming. Then, you’ll dive into real-world computing by creating a“Hello World” app using flash LEDs.As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll go back to an age when analog needle meters ruled the world of data display. You’ll learn to retrieve weather data from a web service and display it on an analog needle meter, and build a home security system using the Raspberry Pi. The next project has a modern twist, where we employ the Raspberry Pi to send a signal to a web service that will send you a text when someone is at the door. In the final project, you take what you've learned from the previous two projects and create an IoT robot car that you can use to monitor what your pets are up to when you are away.By the end of this book, you will be well versed in almost every possible way to make your IoT projects stand out.

Building Smart LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Robots. Leverage the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 platform to build and program intelligent robots

Kyle Markland

Smart robots are an ever-increasing part of our daily lives. With LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3, you can now prototype your very own small-scale smart robot that uses specialized programming and hardware to complete a mission. EV3 is a robotics platform for enthusiasts of all ages and experience levels that makes prototyping robots accessible to all.This book will walk you through six different projects that range from intermediate to advanced level. The projects will show you building and programming techniques that are used by engineers in the real world, which will help you build your own smart robot.You'll see how to make the most of the EV3 robotics platform and build some awesome smart robots. The book starts by introducing some real-world examples of smart robots. Then, we'll walk you through six different projects and explain the features that allow these robots to make intelligent decisions. The book will guide you as you build your own object-tracking tank, a box-climbing robot, an interactive robotic shark, a quirky bipedal robot, a speedy remote control race car, and a GPS-navigating robot.By the end of this book, you'll have the skills necessary to build and program your own smart robots with EV3.

D3.js Quick Start Guide. Create amazing, interactive visualizations in the browser with JavaScript

Matthew Huntington

D3.js is a JavaScript library that allows you to create graphs and data visualizations in the browser with HTML, SVG, and CSS. This book will take you from the basics of D3.js, so that you can create your own interactive visualizations, to creating the most common graphs that you will encounter as a developer, scientist, statistician, or data scientist.The book begins with an overview of SVG, the basis for creating two-dimensional graphics in the browser. Once the reader has a firm understanding of SVG, we will tackle the basics of how to use D3.js to connect data to our SVG elements. We will start with a scatter plot that maps run data to circles on a graph, and expand our scatter plot to make it interactive. You will see how you can easily allow the users of your graph to create, edit, and delete run data by simply dragging and clicking the graph. Next, we will explore creating a bar graph, using external data from a mock API.After that, we will explore animations and motion with a bar graph, and use various physics-based forces to create a force-directed graph. Finally, we will look at how to use GeoJSON data to create a map.

Learning Salesforce Einstein. Add artificial intelligence capabilities to your business solutions with Heroku, PredictiveIO, and Force

Mohit Shrivatsava

Dreamforce 16 brought forth the latest addition to the Salesforce platform: an AI tool named Einstein. Einstein promises to provide users of all Salesforce applications with a powerful platform to help them gain deep insights into the data they work on. This book will introduce you to Einstein and help you integrate it into your respective business applications based on the Salesforce platform. We start off with an introduction to AI, then move on to look at how AI can make your CRM and apps smarter. Next, we discuss various out-of-the-box components added to sales, service, marketing, and community clouds from Salesforce to add Artificial Intelligence capabilities. Further on, we teach you how to use Heroku, PredictionIO, and the Force platform, along with Einstein, to build smarter apps. The core chapters focus on developer content and introduce PredictionIO and Salesforce Einstein Vision Services. We explore Einstein Predictive Vision Services, along with analytics cloud, the Einstein Data Discovery product, and IOT core concepts. Throughout the book, we also focus on how Einstein can be integrated into CRM and various clouds such as sales, services, marketing, and communities. By the end of the book, you will be able to embrace and leverage the power of Einstein, incorporating its functions to gain more knowledge. Salesforce developers will be introduced to the world of AI, while data scientists will gain insights into Salesforce’s various cloud offerings and how they can use Einstein’s capabilities and enhance applications.

AWS Administration Cookbook. Harness the full capability of AWS

Rowan Udell, Lucas Chan

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a bundled remote computing service that provides cloud computing infrastructure over the Internet with storage, bandwidth, and customized support for application programming interfaces (API). Implementing these services to efficiently administer your cloud environments is a core task.This book will help you build and administer your cloud environment with AWS. We’ll begin with the AWS fundamentals, and you’ll build the foundation for the recipes you’ll work on throughout the book. Next, you will find out how to manage multiple accounts and set up consolidated billing. You will then learn to set up reliable and fast hosting for static websites, share data between running instances, and back up your data for compliance. Moving on, you will find out how to use the compute service to enable consistent and fast instance provisioning, and will see how to provision storage volumes and autoscale an application server. Next, you’ll discover how to effectively use the networking and database service of AWS. You will also learn about the different management tools of AWS along with securing your AWS cloud. Finally, you will learn to estimate the costs for your cloud. By the end of the book, you will be able to easily administer your AWS cloud.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 PowerShell Cookbook. Powerful recipes to automate time-consuming administrative tasks - Fourth Edition

Jonas Andersson, Nuno Mota, Mike Pfeiffer

We start with a set of recipes on core PowerShell concepts. This will provide you with a foundation for the examples in the book. Next, you'll see how to implement some of the common exchange management shell tasks, so you can effectively write scripts with this latest release. You will then learn to manage Exchange recipients, automate recipient-related tasks in your environment, manage mailboxes, and understand distribution group management within the Exchange Management Shell. Moving on, we'll work through several scenarios where PowerShell scripting can be used to increase your efficiency when managing databases, which are the most critical resources in your Exchange environment. Towards the end, you'll discover how to achieve Exchange High Availability and how to secure your environment, monitor the health of Exchange, and integrate Exchange with Office Online Server, Skype for Business Server, and Exchange Online (Office 365).By the end of the book, you will be able to perform administrative tasks efficiently.

CompTIA Server+ Certification Guide. A comprehensive, end-to-end study guide for the SK0-004 certification, along with mock exams

Ron Price

CompTIA Server+ Certification is one of the top 5 IT certifications that is vendor neutral.System administrators opt for CompTIA server+ Certification to gain advanced knowledge of concepts including troubleshooting and networking.This book will initially start with the configuration of a basic network server and the configuration for each of its myriad roles. The next set of chapters will provide an overview of the responsibilities and tasks performed by a system administrator to manage and maintain a network server. Moving ahead, you will learn the basic security technologies, methods, and procedures that can be applied to a server and its network. Next, you will cover the troubleshooting procedures and methods in general, and specifically for hardware, software, networks, storage devices, and security applications. Toward the end of this book, we will cover a number of troubleshooting and security mitigation concepts for running admin servers with ease. This guide will be augmented by test questions and mock papers that will help you obtain the necessary certification.By the end of this book, you will be in a position to clear Server+ Certification with ease.

Big Data Analytics with SAS. Get actionable insights from your Big Data using the power of SAS

David Pope

SAS has been recognized by Money Magazine and Payscale as one of the top business skills to learn in order to advance one’s career. Through innovative data management, analytics, and business intelligence software and services, SAS helps customers solve their business problems by allowing them to make better decisions faster. This book introduces the reader to the SAS and how they can use SAS to perform efficient analysis on any size data, including Big Data.The reader will learn how to prepare data for analysis, perform predictive, forecasting, and optimization analysis and then deploy or report on the results of these analyses. While performing the coding examples within this book the reader will learn how to use the web browser based SAS Studio and iPython Jupyter Notebook interfaces for working with SAS. Finally, the reader will learn how SAS’s architecture is engineered and designed to scale up and/or out and be combined with the open source offerings such as Hadoop, Python, and R. By the end of this book, you will be able to clearly understand how you can efficiently analyze Big Data using SAS.

Hands-On High Performance Programming with Qt 5

Mark Krajewski

Achieving efficient code through performance tuning is one of the key challenges faced by many programmers. This book looks at Qt programming from a performance perspective. You'll explore the performance problems encountered when using the Qt framework and means and ways to resolve them and optimize performance.   The book highlights performance improvements and new features released in Qt 5.9, Qt 5.11, and 5.12 (LTE). You'll master general computer performance best practices and tools, which can help you identify the reasons behind low performance, and the most common performance pitfalls experienced when using the Qt framework. In the following chapters, you'll explore multithreading and asynchronous programming with C++ and Qt and learn the importance and efficient use of data structures. You'll also get the opportunity to work through techniques such as memory management and design guidelines, which are essential to improve application performance. Comprehensive sections that cover all these concepts will prepare you for gaining hands-on experience of some of Qt's most exciting application fields - the mobile and embedded development domains.   By the end of this book, you'll be ready to build Qt applications that are more efficient, concurrent, and performance-oriented in nature  

Building Smart Drones with ESP8266 and Arduino. Build exciting drones by leveraging the capabilities of Arduino and ESP8266

Syed Omar Faruk Towaha

With the use of drones, DIY projects have taken off. Programmers are rapidly moving from traditional application programming to developing exciting multi-utility projects.This book will teach you to build industry-level drones with Arduino and ESP8266 and their modified versions of hardware.With this book, you will explore techniques for leveraging the tiny WiFi chip to enhance your drone and control it over a mobile phone. This book will start with teaching you how to solve problems while building your own WiFi controlled Arduino based drone. You will also learn how to build a Quadcopter and a mission critical drone. Moving on you will learn how to build a prototype drone that will be given a mission to complete which it will do it itself. You will also learn to build various exciting projects such as gliding and racing drones. By the end of this book you will learn how to maintain and troubleshoot your drone.By the end of this book, you will have learned to build drones using ESP8266 and Arduino and leverage their functionalities to the fullest.

Keras Reinforcement Learning Projects. 9 projects exploring popular reinforcement learning techniques to build self-learning agents

Giuseppe Ciaburro

Reinforcement learning has evolved a lot in the last couple of years and proven to be a successful technique in building smart and intelligent AI networks. Keras Reinforcement Learning Projects installs human-level performance into your applications using algorithms and techniques of reinforcement learning, coupled with Keras, a faster experimental library.The book begins with getting you up and running with the concepts of reinforcement learning using Keras. You’ll learn how to simulate a random walk using Markov chains and select the best portfolio using dynamic programming (DP) and Python. You’ll also explore projects such as forecasting stock prices using Monte Carlo methods, delivering vehicle routing application using Temporal Distance (TD) learning algorithms, and balancing a Rotating Mechanical System using Markov decision processes.Once you’ve understood the basics, you’ll move on to Modeling of a Segway, running a robot control system using deep reinforcement learning, and building a handwritten digit recognition model in Python using an image dataset. Finally, you’ll excel in playing the board game Go with the help of Q-Learning and reinforcement learning algorithms.By the end of this book, you’ll not only have developed hands-on training on concepts, algorithms, and techniques of reinforcement learning but also be all set to explore the world of AI.