Learning Microsoft Cognitive Services. Leverage Machine Learning APIs to build smart applications - Second Edition

Leif Larsen

Microsoft has revamped its Project Oxford to launch the all new Cognitive Services platform-a set of 30 APIs to add speech, vision, language, and knowledge capabilities to apps.This book will introduce you to 24 of the APIs released as part of Cognitive Services platform and show you how to leverage their capabilities. More importantly, you'll see how the power of these APIs can be combined to build real-world apps that have cognitive capabilities. The book is split into three sections: computer vision, speech recognition and language processing, and knowledge and search.You will be taken through the vision APIs at first as this is very visual, and not too complex. The next part revolves around speech and language, which are somewhat connected. The last part is about adding real-world intelligence to apps by connecting them to Knowledge and Search APIs.By the end of this book, you will be in a position to understand what Microsoft Cognitive Service can offer and how to use the different APIs.

C++ Reactive Programming. Design concurrent and asynchronous applications using the RxCpp library and Modern C++17

Praseed Pai, Peter Abraham

Reactive programming is an effective way to build highly responsive applications with an easy-to-maintain code base. This book covers the essential functional reactive concepts that will help you build highly concurrent, event-driven, and asynchronous applications in a simpler and less error-prone way.C++ Reactive Programming begins with a discussion on how event processing was undertaken by different programming systems earlier. After a brisk introduction to modern C++ (C++17), you’ll be taken through language-level concurrency and the lock-free programming model to set the stage for our foray into the Functional Programming model. Following this, you’ll be introduced to RxCpp and its programming model. You’ll be able to gain deep insights into the RxCpp library, which facilitates reactive programming. You’ll learn how to deal with reactive programming using Qt/C++ (for the desktop) and C++ microservices for the Web.By the end of the book, you will be well versed with advanced reactive programming concepts in modern C++ (C++17).

F# High Performance. Increase your F# programming productivity and focus on performance optimization with best practices, expert techniques, and more

Eriawan Kusumawardhono

F# is a functional programming language and is used in enterprise applications that demand high performance. It has its own unique trait: it is a functional programming language and has OOP support at the same time.This book will help you make F# applications run faster with examples you can easily break down and take into your own work. You will be able to assess the performance of the program and identify bottlenecks. Beginning with a gentle overview of concurrency features in F#, you will get to know the advanced topics of concurrency optimizations in F#, such as F# message passing agent of MailboxProcessor and further interoperation with .NET TPL. Based on this knowledge, you will be able to enhance the performance optimizations when implementing and using other F# language features.The book also covers optimization techniques by using F# best practices and F# libraries. You will learn how the concepts of concurrency and parallel programming will help in improving the performance. With this, you would be able to take advantage of multi-core processors and track memory leaks, root causes, and CPU issues. Finally, you will be able to test their applications to achieve scalability.

Mastering Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016. The compilation of best skillset to harness Microsoft Dynamics NAV for Administrators, Consultants, and Developers

Rabindra Sah

The book begins by giving you a brief introduction to setting up your NAV environment and shows you how to install and configure it according to your requirements. You will then dive deep into the latest design patterns, network architecture, and topologies. We will show you how you can integrate NAV with the Microsoft platform, and secure your deployment by managing roles and permissions.Moving on, we will explain how to monitor and manage server instances using the Administration tool. We’ll discuss how you can take advantage of the expanded extensibility and connectivity capabilities for a tighter integration with the cloud as well as handheld devices. Then, we’ll show you how you can make use of the PowerBI capabilities that have been built into Dynamics NAV.By the end of the book, you will be confident in developing and administering a Dynamics NAV implementation that will leverage all of the new features.

R Machine Learning Projects. Implement supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning techniques using R 3.5

Dr. Sunil Kumar Chinnamgari

R is one of the most popular languages when it comes to performing computational statistics (statistical computing) easily and exploring the mathematical side of machine learning. With this book, you will leverage the R ecosystem to build efficient machine learning applications that carry out intelligent tasks within your organization.This book will help you test your knowledge and skills, guiding you on how to build easily through to complex machine learning projects. You will first learn how to build powerful machine learning models with ensembles to predict employee attrition. Next, you’ll implement a joke recommendation engine and learn how to perform sentiment analysis on Amazon reviews. You’ll also explore different clustering techniques to segment customers using wholesale data. In addition to this, the book will get you acquainted with credit card fraud detection using autoencoders, and reinforcement learning to make predictions and win on a casino slot machine.By the end of the book, you will be equipped to confidently perform complex tasks to build research and commercial projects for automated operations.

Big Data Visualization. Bring scalability and dynamics to your Big Data visualization

James D. Miller

Gain valuable insight into big data analytics with this book. Covering the tools you need to analyse data, together with IBM certified expert James Miller?s insight, this book is the key to data visualization success. ? Learn the tools & techniques to process big data for efficient data visualization ? Packed with insightful real-world use cases ? Addresses the difficulties faced by professionals in the field of big data analytics

Mastering Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. An advanced guide to developing and customizing CRM solutions to improve your business applications - Second Edition

Deepesh Somani

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an all-in-one business management solution that's easy to use and adapt. It helps you connect your finances, sales, service, and operations to streamline business processes, improve customer interactions, and enable growth. This book gives you all the information you need to become an expert in MS Dynamics 365.This book starts with a brief overview of the functional features of Dynamics 365. You will learn how to create Word and Excel templates using CRM data to enable customized data analysis for your organization. This book helps you understand how to use Dynamics 365 as an XRM Framework, gain a deep understanding of client-side scripting in Dynamics 365, and create client-side applications using JavaScript and the Web API.In addition to this, you will discover how to customize Dynamics 365, and quickly move on to grasp the app structure, which helps you customize Dynamics 365 better. You will also learn how Dynamics 365 can be seamlessly embedded into various productivity tools to customize them for machine learning and contextual guidance.By the end of this book, you will have mastered utilizing Dynamics 365 features through real-world scenarios.

Mastering Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016. An advanced guide for effective Dynamics CRM customization and development

Deepesh Somani

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is the most trusted name in enterprise-level customer relationship management. The latest version of Dynamics CRM 2016 comes with some exciting extra features guaranteed to make your life easier with Dynamics CRM. This book provides a comprehensive coverage of Dynamics CRM 2016 and helps you make your tasks much simpler while elevating you to the level of an expert.The book starts with a brief overview of the functional features and then introduces the latest features of Dynamics CRM 2016. You will learn to create Word and Excel templates, using CRM data that will enable you to provide customized data analysis for your organization. You will understand how to utilize Dynamics CRM as an XRM Framework, gain a deep understanding about client-side scripting in Dynamics CRM, and learn creating client-side applications using JavaScript and Web API. We then introduce visual control frameworks for Dynamics CRM 2016 mobile and tablet applications. Business Process Flows, Business Rules, and their enhancements are introduced. By the end of this book, you will have mastered utilizing Dynamics CRM 2016 features through real-world scenarios.

MongoDB 4 Quick Start Guide. Learn the skills you need to work with the world's most popular NoSQL database

Doug Bierer

MongoDB has grown to become the de facto NoSQL database with millions of users, from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. It can solve problems that are considered difficult, if not impossible, for aging RDBMS technologies. Written for version 4 of MongoDB, this book is the easiest way to get started with MongoDB.You will start by getting a MongoDB installation up and running in a safe and secure manner. You will learn how to perform mission-critical create, read, update, and delete operations, and set up database security. You will also learn about advanced features of MongoDB such as the aggregation pipeline, replication, and sharding. You will learn how to build a simple web application that uses MongoDB to respond to AJAX queries, and see how to make use of the MongoDB programming language driver for PHP. The examples incorporate new features available in MongoDB version 4 where appropriate.

Blockchain Quick Reference. A guide to exploring decentralized blockchain application development

Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt

Blockchain Quick Reference takes you through the electrifying world of blockchain technology and is designed for those who want to polish their existing knowledge regarding the various pillars of the blockchain ecosystem.This book is your go-to guide, teaching you how to apply principles and ideas for making your life and business better. You will cover the architecture, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), tokens, smart contracts, and terminologies of the blockchain technology, before studying how they work. All you need is a curious mind to get started with blockchain technology. Once you have grasped the basics, you will explore components of Ethereum, such as ether tokens, transactions, and smart contracts, in order to build simple Dapps. You will then move on to learning why Solidity is used specifically for Ethereum-based projects, followed by exploring different types of blockchain with easy-to-follow examples. All this will help you tackle challenges and problems. By the end of this book, you will not only have solved current and future problems relating to blockchain technology but will also be able to build efficient decentralized applications.

Perl 6 Deep Dive. Data manipulation, concurrency, functional programming, and more

Andrew Shitov

Perl is a family of high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages consisting of Perl 5 and Perl 6. Perl 6 helps developers write concise and declarative code that is easy to maintain. This book is an end-to-end guide that will help non-Perl developers get to grips with the language and use it to solve real-world problems. Beginning with a brief introduction to Perl 6, the first module in the book will teach you how to write and execute basic programs. The second module delves into language constructs, where you will learn about the built-in data types, variables, operators, modules, subroutines, and so on available in Perl 6. Here the book also delves deeply into data manipulation (for example, strings and text files) and you will learn how to create safe and correct Perl 6 modules. You will learn to create software in Perl by following the Object Oriented Paradigm. The final module explains in detail the incredible concurrency support provided by Perl 6. Here you will also learn about regexes, functional programming, and reactive programming in Perl 6. By the end of the book, with the help of a number of examples that you can follow and immediately run, modify, and use in practice, you will be fully conversant with the benefits of Perl 6.

TensorFlow: Powerful Predictive Analytics with TensorFlow. Predict valuable insights of your data with TensorFlow

Md. Rezaul Karim

Predictive analytics discovers hidden patterns from structured and unstructured data for automated decision making in business intelligence. Predictive decisions are becoming a huge trend worldwide, catering to wide industry sectors by predicting which decisions are more likely to give maximum results. TensorFlow, Google’s brainchild, is immensely popular and extensively used for predictive analysis.This book is a quick learning guide on all the three types of machine learning, that is, supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning with TensorFlow. This book will teach you predictive analytics for high-dimensional and sequence data. In particular, you will learn the linear regression model for regression analysis. You will also learn how to use regression for predicting continuous values. You will learn supervised learning algorithms for predictive analytics. You will explore unsupervised learning and clustering using K-meansYou will then learn how to predict neighborhoods using K-means, and then, see another example of clustering audio clips based on their audio features. This book is ideal for developers, data analysts, machine learning practitioners, and deep learning enthusiasts who want to build powerful, robust, and accurate predictive models with the power of TensorFlow. This book is embedded with useful assessments that will help you revise the concepts you have learned in this book. This book is repurposed for this specific learning experience from material from Packt's Predictive Analytics with TensorFlow by Md. Rezaul Karim.

Hands-On Cryptography with Python. Leverage the power of Python to encrypt and decrypt data

Samuel Bowne

Cryptography is essential for protecting sensitive information, but it is often performed inadequately or incorrectly. Hands-On Cryptography with Python starts by showing you how to encrypt and evaluate your data. The book will then walk you through various data encryption methods,such as obfuscation, hashing, and strong encryption, and will show how you can attack cryptographic systems. You will learn how to create hashes, crack them, and will understand why they are so different from each other. In the concluding chapters, you will use three NIST-recommended systems: the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA), and the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA). By the end of this book, you will be able to deal with common errors in encryption.

Swift 3 Game Development. Build iOS 10 Games with Swift 3.0 - Second Edition

Stephen Haney

Swift is the perfect choice for game development. Developers are intrigued by Swift 3.0 and want to make use of new features to develop their best games yet. Packed with best practices and easy-to-use examples, this book leads you step by step through the development of your first Swift game.This book starts by introducing SpriteKit and Swift's new features that can be used for game development. After setting up your first Swift project, you will build your first custom class, learn how to draw and animate your game, and add physics simulations.Then, you will add the player character, NPCs, and powerups. To make your game more fun and engaging, you will learn how to set up scenes and backgrounds, build fun menus, and integrate with Apple Game Center to add leaderboards and achievements. You will then make your game stand out by adding animations when game objects collide, and incorporate proven techniques such as the advanced particle system and graphics. Finally, you will explore the various options available to start down the path towards monetization and publish your finished games to the App Store.By the end of this book, you will be able to create your own iOS games using Swift and SpriteKit.

Python Programming with Raspberry Pi. Build small yet powerful robots and automation systems with Raspberry Pi Zero

Sai Yamanoor, Srihari Yamanoor

Raspberry Pi Zero is a super-small and super-affordable product from Raspberry Pi that is packed with a plethora of features and has grabbed the notice of programmers, especially those who use Python. This step-by-step guide will get you developing practical applications in Python using a Raspberry Pi Zero. It will become a valuable resource as you learn the essential details of interfacing sensors and actuators to a Raspberry Pi, as well as acquiring and displaying data. You will get started by writing a Python program that blinks an LED at 1-second intervals. Then you will learn to write simple logic to execute tasks based upon sensor data (for example, to control a motor) and retrieve data from the web (such as to check e-mails to provide a visual alert). Finally, you will learn to build a home automation system with Python where different appliances are controlled using the Raspberry Pi. The examples discussed in each chapter of this book culminate in a project that help improve the quality of people’s lives.

Hands-On Network Forensics. Investigate network attacks and find evidence using common network forensic tools

Nipun Jaswal

Network forensics is a subset of digital forensics that deals with network attacks and their investigation. In the era of network attacks and malware threat, it’s now more important than ever to have skills to investigate network attacks and vulnerabilities.Hands-On Network Forensics starts with the core concepts within network forensics, including coding, networking, forensics tools, and methodologies for forensic investigations. You’ll then explore the tools used for network forensics, followed by understanding how to apply those tools to a PCAP file and write the accompanying report. In addition to this, you will understand how statistical flow analysis, network enumeration, tunneling and encryption, and malware detection can be used to investigate your network. Towards the end of this book, you will discover how network correlation works and how to bring all the information from different types of network devices together.By the end of this book, you will have gained hands-on experience of performing forensics analysis tasks.

Oracle JET for Developers. Implement client-side JavaScript efficiently for enterprise Oracle applications

Raja Malleswara Rao Malleswara Rao Pattamsetti

This book will give you a complete practical understanding of the Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET) and how you can use it to develop efficient client-side applications with ease. It will tell you how to get your own customized Oracle JET set up.You'll start with individual libraries, such as jQuery, Cordova, and Require.js. You'll also get to work with the JavaScript libraries created by Oracle, especially for cloud developers. You'll use these tools to create a working backend application with these libraries. Using the latest Oracle Alta UI, you'll develop a state-of-the-art backend for your cloud applications. You'll learn how to develop and integrate thedifferent cloud services required for your application and use other third-party libraries to get more features from your cloud applications.Toward the end of the book, you'll learn how to manage and secure your cloud applications, and test them to ensure seamless deployment.

Go Standard Library Cookbook. Over 120 specific ways to make full use of the standard library components in Golang

Radomír Sohlich

Google's Golang will be the next talk of the town, with amazing features and a powerful library. This book will gear you up for using golang by taking you through recipes that will teach you how to leverage the standard library to implement a particular solution. This will enable Go developers to take advantage of using a rock-solid standard library instead of third-party frameworks. The book begins by exploring the functionalities available for interaction between the environment and the operating system. We will explore common string operations, date/time manipulations, and numerical problems. We'll then move on to working with the database, accessing the filesystem, and performing I/O operations. From a networking perspective, we will touch on client and server-side solutions. The basics of concurrency are also covered, before we wrap up with a few tips and tricks. By the end of the book, you will have a good overview of the features of the Golang standard library and what you can achieve with them. Ultimately, you will be proficient in implementing solutions with powerful standard libraries.

User Experience Mapping. Enhance UX with User Story Map, Journey Map and Diagrams

Peter W. Szabo

Do you want to create better products and innovative solutions? User experience maps will help you understand your users and improve communication with them. Maps can also champion user-centricity within the organization.This book is the first print resource covering two advanced mapping techniques—the behavioral change map and the 4D UX map. You’ll explore user story maps, task models, and journey maps, while also creating wireflows, mental model maps, ecosystem maps, and solution maps. You’ll learn how to use insights from real users to create and improve your maps and products.The book delves into each major user experience map type, ranging from simple techniques based on sticky notes to more complex map types, and guides you in solving real-world problems with maps. You’ll understand how to create maps using a variety of software products, including Adobe Illustrator, Balsamiq Mockups, Axure RP, and Microsoft Word. Besides, you can draw each map type with pen and paper too!The book also showcases communication techniques and workshop ideas. You’ll learn about the Kaizen-UX management framework, developed by the author, now used by many agencies and in-house UX teams in Europe and beyond.Buying this book will give you hundreds of hours worth of user experience knowledge, from one of the world’s leading UX consultants. It will change your users’ world for the better. If you are still not convinced, we have hidden some cat drawings in it, just in case.

Splunk 7.x Quick Start Guide. Gain business data insights from operational intelligence

James H. Baxter

Splunk is a leading platform and solution for collecting, searching, and extracting value from ever increasing amounts of big data - and big data is eating the world! This book covers all the crucial Splunk topics and gives you the information and examples to get the immediate job done. You will find enough insights to support further research and use Splunk to suit any business environment or situation.Splunk 7.x Quick Start Guide gives you a thorough understanding of how Splunk works. You will learn about all the critical tasks for architecting, implementing, administering, and utilizing Splunk Enterprise to collect, store, retrieve, format, analyze, and visualize machine data. You will find step-by-step examples based on real-world experience and practical use cases that are applicable to all Splunk environments. There is a careful balance between adequate coverage of all the critical topics with short but relevant deep-dives into the configuration options and steps to carry out the day-to-day tasks that matter.By the end of the book, you will be a confident and proficient Splunk architect and administrator.

Mastering AWS Security. Create and maintain a secure cloud ecosystem

Albert Anthony

Mastering AWS Security starts with a deep dive into the fundamentals of the shared security responsibility model. This book tells you how you can enable continuous security, continuous auditing, and continuous compliance by automating your security in AWS with the tools, services, and features it provides.Moving on, you will learn about access control in AWS for all resources. You will also learn about the security of your network, servers, data and applications in the AWS cloud using native AWS security services. By the end of this book, you will understand the complete AWS Security landscape, covering all aspects of end - to -end software and hardware security along with logging, auditing, and compliance of your entire IT environment in the AWS cloud. Lastly, the book will wrap up with AWS best practices for security.

Hands-On Deep Learning for Games. Leverage the power of neural networks and reinforcement learning to build intelligent games

Micheal Lanham

The number of applications of deep learning and neural networks has multiplied in the last couple of years. Neural nets has enabled significant breakthroughs in everything from computer vision, voice generation, voice recognition and self-driving cars. Game development is also a key area where these techniques are being applied. This book will give an in depth view of the potential of deep learning and neural networks in game development. We will take a look at the foundations of multi-layer perceptron’s to using convolutional and recurrent networks. In applications from GANs that create music or textures to self-driving cars and chatbots. Then we introduce deep reinforcement learning through the multi-armed bandit problem and other OpenAI Gym environments.As we progress through the book we will gain insights about DRL techniques such as Motivated Reinforcement Learning with Curiosity and Curriculum Learning. We also take a closer look at deep reinforcement learning and in particular the Unity ML-Agents toolkit. By the end of the book, we will look at how to apply DRL and the ML-Agents toolkit to enhance, test and automate your games or simulations. Finally, we will cover your possible next steps and possible areas for future learning.

Hands-On Agile Software Development with JIRA. Design and manage software projects using the Agile methodology

David Harned

As teams scale in size, project management can get very complicated. One of the best tools to deal with this kind of problem is JIRA. This book will start by organizing your project requirements and the principles of Agile development to get you started. You will then be introduced to set up a JIRA account and the JIRA ecosystem to help you implement a dashboard for your team's work and issues. You will learn how to manage any issues and bugs that might emerge in the development stage. Going ahead, the book will help you build reports and use them to plan the releases based on the study of the reports. Towards the end, you will come across working with the gathered data and create a dashboard that helps you track the project's development.

Angular Design Patterns. Implement the Gang of Four patterns in your apps with Angular

Mathieu Nayrolles

This book is an insightful journey through the most valuable design patterns, and it will provide clear guidance on how to use them effectively in Angular. You will explore some of the best ways to work with Angular and how to use it to meet the stability and performance required in today's web development world. You’ll get to know some Angular best practices to improve your productivity and the code base of your application.We will take you on a journey through Angular designs for the real world, using a combination of case studies, design patterns to follow, and anti-patterns to avoid.By the end of the book, you will understand the various features of Angular, and will be able to apply well-known, industry-proven design patterns in your work.