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.

Pentaho Data Integration Quick Start Guide. Create ETL processes using Pentaho

María Carina Roldán

Pentaho Data Integration(PDI) is an intuitive and graphical environment packed with drag and drop design and powerful Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) capabilities. Given its power and flexibility, initial attempts to use the Pentaho Data Integration tool can be difficult or confusing. This book is the ideal solution.This book reduces your learning curve with PDI. It provides the guidance needed to make you productive, covering the main features of Pentaho Data Integration. It demonstrates the interactive features of the graphical designer, and takes you through the main ETL capabilities that the tool offers.By the end of the book, you will be able to use PDI for extracting, transforming, and loading the types of data you encounter on a daily basis.

Mastering Vim. Build a software development environment with Vim and Neovim

Ruslan Osipov

Vim is a ubiquitous text editor that can be used for all programming languages. It has an extensive plugin system and integrates with many tools. Vim offers an extensible and customizable development environment for programmers, making it one of the most popular text editors in the world. Mastering Vim begins with explaining how the Vim editor will help you build applications efficiently. With the fundamentals of Vim, you will be taken through the Vim philosophy. As you make your way through the chapters, you will learn about advanced movement, text operations, and how Vim can be used as a Python (or any other language for that matter) IDE. The book will then cover essential tasks, such as refactoring, debugging, building, testing, and working with a version control system, as well as plugin configuration and management. In the concluding chapters, you will be introduced to additional mindset guidelines, learn to personalize your Vim experience, and go above and beyond with Vimscript.By the end of this book, you will be sufficiently confident to make Vim (or its fork, Neovim) your first choice when writing applications in Python and other programming languages.

Salesforce Process Builder Quick Start Guide. Build complex workflows by clicking, not coding

Rakesh Gupta

Salesforce Management System is an information system used in CRM to automate business processes, such as sales and marketing. Process Builder is a visual tool created to automate business processes in Salesforce. It enables users with no coding expertise to build complex Salesforce workflows.The book starts with an introduction to Process Builder, focussing on the building blocks of creating Processes. Then you will learn about different applications of Process Builder for developing streamlined solutions. You will learn how to easily automate business processes and tackle complex business scenarios using Processes. The book explains the workings of the Process Builder so that you can create reusable processes. It also explains how you can migrate existing Workflow Rules to Process Builder.By the end of the book, you will have a clear understanding of how to use Flows and Process Builder to optimize code usage.

Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations Development Cookbook. Recipes to explore forms, look-ups and different integrations like Power BI and MS Office for your business solutions - Fourth Edition

Abhimanyu Singh, Deepak Agarwal

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations has a lot to offer developers. It allows them to customize and tailor their implementations to meet their organization’s needs. This Development Cookbook will help you manage your company or customer ERP information and operations efficiently. We start off by exploring the concept of data manipulation in Dynamics 365 for Operations. This will also help you build scripts to assist data migration, and show you how to organize data in forms. You will learn how to create custom lookups using Application Object Tree forms and generate them dynamically. We will also show you how you can enhance your application by using advanced form controls, and integrate your system with other external systems. We will help you script and enhance your user interface using UI elements. This book will help you look at application development from a business process perspective, and develop enhanced ERP solutions by learning and implementing the best practices and techniques.

Mastering VMware vSphere 6.5. Leverage the power of vSphere for effective virtualization, administration, management and monitoring of data centers

Paolo Valsecchi, Karel Novak, Andrea Mauro

VMware vSphere 6.5 provides a powerful, flexible and secure foundation for next-generation applications which helps you create an effective digital transformation. This book will be based on VMware vSphere 6.5 which empowers you to virtualize any complex application with ease. You’ll begin by getting an overview of all the products, solutions and features of the vSphere 6.5 suite, comparing the evolutions with the previous releases. Next ,you’ll design and plan a virtualization infrastructure to drive planning and performance analysis. Following this , you will be proceeding with workflow and installation of components. New network trends are also covered which will help you in optimally designing the vSphere environment. You will also learn the practices and procedures involved in configuring and managing virtual machines in a vSphere infrastructure. With vSphere 6.5, you’ll make use of significantly more powerful capabilities for patching, upgrading, and managing the configuration of the virtual environment. Next we’ll focus on specific availability and resiliency solutions in vSphere. Towards the end of the book you will get information on how to save your configuration, data and workload from your virtual infrastructure. By the end of the book you’ll learn about VMware vSphere 6.5 right from design to deployment and management.

Blender Quick Start Guide. 3D Modeling, Animation, and Render with Eevee in Blender 2.8

Allan Brito

Blender is open source 3D creation software. With a long history and an enthusiastic community of users, it is the ideal choice for almost any kind of work with 3D modeling or animation. However, for new users, its power and ?exibillity can sometimes be daunting, and that’s when you need this book!The book starts by showing you round the all-new Blender 2.8 user interface. You'll look at the most commonly-used options and tools, such as navigating in 3D and selecting objects. You will then use and manipulate one of the most important windows of the interface, the 3D View.You'll learn how to use essential tools for working with 3D modeling. To give your models the feel of real-world objects, you'll learn how to create materials and set up surfaces. You'll see how to use Physically-Based Rendering (PBR), which allows you to craft realistic surfaces such as wood, stone, and metal. You will also work with Eevee, a new real-time render engine in Blender. You will see how to add motion to objects, making use of Blender's impressive 3D animation features. Finally, you'll learn how to create scenes and organize them for rendering, and later add titles and effects using built-in Blender tools.By the end of the book, you will be able to use Blender 2.8 new UI, Create 3D Models with textures, Animations, and Render them in real-time using Eevee.

Game Development Patterns and Best Practices. Better games, less hassle

John P. Doran, Matt Casanova

You’ve learned how to program, and you’ve probably created some simple games at some point, but now you want to build larger projects and find out how to resolve your problems. So instead of a coder, you might now want to think like a game developer or software engineer. To organize your code well, you need certain tools to do so, and that’s what this book is all about. You will learn techniques to code quickly and correctly, while ensuring your code is modular and easily understandable.To begin, we will start with the core game programming patterns, but not the usual way. We will take the use case strategy with this book. We will take an AAA standard game and show you the hurdles at multiple stages of development. Similarly, various use cases are used to showcase other patterns such as the adapter pattern, prototype pattern, flyweight pattern, and observer pattern. Lastly, we’ll go over some tips and tricks on how to refactor your code to remove common code smells and make it easier for others to work with you. By the end of the book you will be proficient in using the most popular and frequently used patterns with the best practices.

Swift 4 Protocol-Oriented Programming. Bring predictability, performance, and productivity to your Swift applications - Third Edition

Jon Hoffman

Swift has become the number one language used in iOS and macOS development. The Swift standard library is developed using protocol-oriented programming techniques, generics, and first-class value semantics; therefore, every Swift developer should understand these powerful concepts and how to take advantage of them in their application design.This book will help you understand the differences between object-oriented programming and protocol-oriented programming. It will demonstrate how to work with protocol-oriented programming using real-world use cases. You will gain a solid knowledge of the various types that can be used in Swift and the differences between value and reference types. You will be taught how protocol-oriented programming techniques can be used to develop very flexible and easy-to-maintain code.By the end of the book, you will have a thorough understanding of protocol-oriented programming and how to utilize it to build powerful and practical applications.

Hands-On Penetration Testing on Windows. Unleash Kali Linux, PowerShell, and Windows debugging tools for security testing and analysis

Phil Bramwell

Windows has always been the go-to platform for users around the globe to perform administration and ad hoc tasks, in settings that range from small offices to global enterprises, and this massive footprint makes securing Windows a unique challenge. This book will enable you to distinguish yourself to your clients.In this book, you'll learn advanced techniques to attack Windows environments from the indispensable toolkit that is Kali Linux. We'll work through core network hacking concepts and advanced Windows exploitation techniques, such as stack and heap overflows, precision heap spraying, and kernel exploitation, using coding principles that allow you to leverage powerful Python scripts and shellcode.We'll wrap up with post-exploitation strategies that enable you to go deeper and keep your access. Finally, we'll introduce kernel hacking fundamentals and fuzzing testing, so you can discover vulnerabilities and write custom exploits. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed in identifying vulnerabilities within the Windows OS and developing the desired solutions for them.

Mastering Spring Boot 2.0. Build modern, cloud-native, and distributed systems using Spring Boot

Dinesh Rajput

Spring is one of the best frameworks on the market for developing web, enterprise, and cloud ready software. Spring Boot simplifies the building of complex software dramatically by reducing the amount of boilerplate code, and by providing production-ready features and a simple deployment model.This book will address the challenges related to power that come with Spring Boot's great configurability and flexibility. You will understand how Spring Boot configuration works under the hood, how to overwrite default configurations, and how to use advanced techniques to prepare Spring Boot applications to work in production. This book will also introduce readers to a relatively new topic in the Spring ecosystem – cloud native patterns, reactive programming, and applications. Get up to speed with microservices with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud. Each chapter aims to solve a specific problem or teach you a useful skillset. By the end of this book, you will be proficient in building and deploying your Spring Boot application.

Rust Standard Library Cookbook. Over 75 recipes to leverage the power of Rust

Jan Hohenheim, Daniel Durante

Mozilla’s Rust is gaining much attention with amazing features and a powerful library. This book will take you through varied recipes to teach you how to leverage the Standard library to implement efficient solutions.The book begins with a brief look at the basic modules of the Standard library and collections. From here, the recipes will cover packages that support file/directory handling and interaction through parsing. You will learn about packages related to advanced data structures, error handling, and networking. You will also learn to work with futures and experimental nightly features. The book also covers the most relevant external crates in Rust. By the end of the book, you will be proficient at using the Rust Standard library.

Learning Android Game Development. A Beginner's guide to developing popular Android games

Nikhil Malankar

In this book, we’ll start with installing Android studio and its components, and setting it up ready for Android N. We teach you how to take inputs from users, create images and interact with them, and work with sprites to create animations. You’ll then explore the various collision detection methods and use sprites to create an explosion. Moving on, you’ll go through the process of UI creation and see how to create buttons as well as display the score and other parameters on screen. By the end of the book, you will have a working example and an understanding of a 2D platform game like Super Mario and know how to convert your 2D games to 3D games.

Mastering Unity 5.x. Click here to enter text

Alan Thorn

Mastering Unity 5.x is for developers wishing to optimize the features of Unity 5.x. With an in-depth focus on a practical project, learn all about Unity architecture and impressive animation techniques. With this book, produce fun games with confidence.

React Cookbook. Create dynamic web apps with React using Redux, Webpack, Node.js, and GraphQL

Carlos Santana Roldán

React.js is Facebook's dynamic frontend web development framework. It helps you build efficient, high-performing web applications with an intuitive user interface.With more than 66 practical and self-contained tutorials, this book examines common pain points and best practices for building web applications with React. Each recipe addresses a specific problem and offers a proven solution with insights into how it works, so that you can modify the code and configuration files to suit your requirements.The React Cookbook starts with recipes for installing and setting up the React.js environment with the Create React Apps tool. You’ll understand how to build web components, forms, animations, and handle events. You’ll then delve into Redux for state management and build amazing UI designs. With the help of practical solutions, this book will guide you in testing, debugging, and scaling your web applications, and get to grips with web technologies like WebPack, Node, and Firebase to develop web APIs and implement SSR capabilities in your apps. Before you wrap up, the recipes on React Native and React VR will assist you in exploring mobile development with React.By the end of the book, you will have become familiar with all the essential tools and best practices required to build efficient solutions on the web with React.

Internet of Things Programming with JavaScript. Get the best out of Arduino and Raspberry Pi Zero to develop Internet of Things projects using JavaScript

Ruben Oliva Ramos

The Internet of Things is taking the tech world by storm, and JavaScript is at its helm. This book will get you to grips with this exciting new technology. Where do Node.js, HTML5 and Windows 10 IoT Core come in with JavaScript and IoT? Why Raspberry Pi Zero rather than Arduino? How do you configure and build an IoT network from scratch? All your IoT JavaScript questions are answered in this book.

QGIS Quick Start Guide. A beginner's guide to getting started with QGIS 3.4

Andrew Cutts

QGIS is a user friendly, open source geographic information system (GIS). The popularity of open source GIS and QGIS, in particular, has been growing rapidly over the last few years. This book is designed to help beginners learn about all the tools required to use QGIS 3.4.This book will provide you with clear, step-by-step instructions to help you apply your GIS knowledge to QGIS. You begin with an overview of QGIS 3.4 and its installation. You will learn how to load existing spatial data and create vector data from scratch. You will then be creating styles and labels for maps. The final two chapters demonstrate the Processing toolbox and include a brief investigation on how to extend QGIS. Throughout this book, we will be using the GeoPackage format, and we will also discuss how QGIS can support many different types of data.Finally, you will learn where to get help and how to become engaged with the GIS community.

Vue.js 2.x by Example. Example-driven guide to build web apps with Vue.js for beginners

Mike Street

Vue.js is a frontend web framework which makes it easy to do just about anything, from displaying data up to creating full-blown web apps, and has become a leading tool for web developers. This book puts Vue.js into a real-world context, guiding you through example projects that helps you build Vue.js applications from scratch.With this book, you will learn how to use Vue.js by creating three Single Page web applications. Throughout this book, we will cover the usage of Vue, for building web interfaces, Vuex, an official Vue plugin which makes caching and storing data easier, and Vue-router, a plugin for creating routes and URLs for your application.Starting with a JSON dataset, the first part of the book covers Vue objects and how to utilize each one. This will be covered by exploring different ways of displaying data from a JSON dataset. We will then move on to manipulating the data with filters and search and creating dynamic values.Next, you will see how easy it is to integrate remote data into an application by learning how to use the Dropbox API to display your Dropbox contents in an applicationIn the final section, you will see how to build a product catalog and dynamic shopping cart using the Vue-router, giving you the building blocks of an e-commerce store.

Learning Concurrency in Kotlin. Build highly efficient and scalable applications

Miguel Angel Castiblanco Torres

Kotlin is a modern and statically typed programming language with support for concurrency. Complete with detailed explanations of essential concepts, practical examples and self-assessment questions, Learning Concurrency in Kotlin addresses the unique challenges in design and implementation of concurrent code. This practical guide will help you to build distributed and scalable applications using Kotlin.Beginning with an introduction to Kotlin's coroutines, you’ll learn how to write concurrent code and understand the fundamental concepts needed to write multithreaded software in Kotlin. You'll explore how to communicate between and synchronize your threads and coroutines to write collaborative asynchronous applications. You'll also learn how to handle errors and exceptions, as well as how to work with a multicore processor to run several programs in parallel. In addition to this, you’ll delve into how coroutines work with each other. Finally, you’ll be able to build an Android application such as an RSS reader by putting your knowledge into practice.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned techniques and skills to write optimized code and multithread applications.

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.

Mastering Firebase for Android Development. Build real-time, scalable, and cloud-enabled Android apps with Firebase

Ashok Kumar S

Firebase offers a wide spectrum of tools and services to help you develop high-quality apps in a short period of time. It also allows you to build web and mobile apps quickly without managing the infrastructure.Mastering Firebase for Android Development takes you through the complete toolchain of Firebase,including the latest tools announced in Google IO 2018 such as Firebase ML-Kit, FireStore, and Firebase Predictions.The book begins by teaching you to configure your development environment with Firebase and set up a different structure for a Firebase real-time database. As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll establish the authentication feature in Android and explore email and phone authentication for managing the on-boarding of users. You’ll be taken through topics on Firebase crash reporting, Firebase functions, Firebase Cloud, Firebase Hosting, and Cloud Messaging for push notifications and explore other key areas in depth. In the concluding chapters, you will learn to use Firebase Test Lab to test your application before using Firebase Performance Monitoring to trace performance setbacks.By the end of the book, you will be well equipped with the Firebase ecosystem, which will help you find solutions to your common application development challenges.

Learning PowerShell DSC. Automate deployment and configuration of your servers - Second Edition

James Pogran

The main goal of this book is to teach you to configure, deploy, and manage your system using the new features of PowerShell v5/v6 DSC.This book begins with the basics of PowerShell Desired State Configuration, covering its architecture and components. It familiarizes you with the set of Windows PowerShell language extensions and new Windows PowerShell commands that make up DSC. Then it helps you create DSC custom resources and work with DSC configurations with the help of practical examples. Finally, it describes how to deploy configuration data using PowerShell DSC. Throughout this book, we will be focusing on concepts such as building configurations with parameters, the local configuration manager, and testing and restoring configurations using PowerShell DSC.By the end of the book, you will be able to deploy a real-world application end-to-end and will be familiar enough with the powerful Desired State Configuration platform to achieve continuous delivery and efficiently and easily manage and deploy data for systems.

Learn Type-Driven Development. Benefit from type systems to build reliable and safe applications using ReasonML 3

Yawar Amin, Kamon Ayeva

Type-driven development is an approach that uses a static type system to achieve results including safety and efficiency. Types are used to express relationships and other assumptions directly in the code, and these assumptions are enforced by the compiler before the code is run. Learn Type-Driven Development covers how to use these type systems to check the logical consistency of your code. This book begins with the basic idea behind type-driven development. You’ll learn about values (or terms) and how they contrast with types. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll cover how to combine types and values inside modules and build structured types out of simpler ones. You’ll then understand how to express choices or alternatives directly in the type system using variants, polymorphic variants, and generalized algebraic data types. You’ll also get to grips with sum types, build sophisticated data types from generics, and explore functions that express change in the types of values. In the concluding chapters, you’ll cover advanced techniques for code reuse, such as parametric polymorphism and subtyping.By end of this book, you will have learned how to iterate through a type-driven process of solving coding problems using static types, together with dynamic behavior, to obtain more safety and speed.

MEAN Cookbook. The meanest set of MEAN stack solutions around

Nicholas McClay

The MEAN Stack is a framework for web application development using JavaScript-based technologies; MongoDB, Express, Angular, and Node.js. If you want to expand your understanding of using JavaScript to produce a fully functional standalone web application, including the web server, user interface, and database, then this book can help guide you through that transition. This book begins by configuring the frontend of the MEAN stack web application using the Angular JavaScript framework. We then implement common user interface enhancements before moving on to configuring the server layer of our MEAN stack web application using Express for our backend APIs. You will learn to configure the database layer of your MEAN stack web application using MongoDB and the Mongoose framework, including modeling relationships between documents. You will explore advanced topics such as optimizing your web application using WebPack as well as the use of automated testing with the Mocha and Chai frameworks. By the end of the book, you should have acquired a level of proficiency that allows you to confidently build a full production-ready and scalable MEAN stack application.