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

SURESH K GORAKALA, Michele Usuelli, Suresh Kumar Gorakala

Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques. Creative ways to build powerful and effective online courses

Moodle Trust, Susan Smith Nash, William Rice, William Rice

Moodle is the world's most popular, free open-source Learning Management System (LMS). It is vast and has lots to offer. More and more colleges, universities, and training providers are using Moodle, which has helped revolutionize e-learning with its flexible, reusable platform and components. It works best when you feel confident that the tools you have at hand will allow you to create exactly what you need.This book brings together step-by-step, easy-to-follow instructions and learning theory to give you new tools and new power with Moodle. It will show you how to connect with your online students, and how and where they develop an enthusiastic, open, and trusting relationship with their fellow students and with you, their instructor. With this book, you'll learn to get the best from Moodle.This book helps you develop good, solid, dynamic courses that will last by making sure that your instructional design is robust, and that they are built around satisfying learning objectives and course outcomes. With this book, you'll have excellent support and step-by-step guidance for putting together courses that incorporate your choice of the many features that Moodle offers. You will also find the best way to create effective assessments, and how to create them for now and in the future. The book will also introduce you to many modules, which you can use to make your course unique and create an environment where your students will get maximum benefit. In addition, you will learn how you can save time and reuse your best ideas by taking advantage of Moodle's unique features.

Mastering Adobe Captivate 8. Create responsive demonstrations, simulations, and quizzes for multiscreen delivery with Adobe Captivate

Damien Bruyndonckx

Odoo Development Essentials. Fast track your development skills to build powerful Odoo business applications

Stephane Wirtel, Daniel Reis

Instant Windows Powershell 3.0 Windows Management Instrumentation Starter. Explore new abilities of Powershell 3.0 to interact with Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) through the use of the new CIM cmdlets and realistic management scenarios

Brenton J.W. Blawat

PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) provide you with the ability to remotely manage systems. Whether it is viewing available disk space, or starting an executable remotely, PowerShell 3.0 WMI provides limitless options for scripting the management of systems.Instant Windows Powershell 3.0 Windows Management Instrumentation Starter follows industry standard scripting techniques, utilizing new powerful Cmdlets, to manage different aspects of an operating system and provides practical examples for managing your systems.You will learn how to create, verify, and terminate new Cmdlets that were introduced with PowerShell 3.0 and apply this new knowledge to real world management scenarios. It will provide detailed information about the structure of WMI, and the best ways to get, set, and execute items on a system, both locally and remotely. You will also learn how to create, verify, and terminate new CIM sessions using the available Cmdlets. You will also learn how to search CIM classes for available properties and methods, create a new instance of a class, get an existing instance of an existing class, get an associated instance of a class, and remove an instance of a class. Finally, you will learn how to remotely execute code on a system using WMI.Instant Windows Powershell 3.0 Windows Management Instrumentation Starter will provide you with the ability to fully utilize Windows Management Instrumentation through the use of a variety of new Cmdlets introduced with PowerShell 3.0.

Delphi High Performance. Master the art of concurrency, parallel programming, and memory management to build fast Delphi apps - Second Edition

Primož Gabrijelčič

Performance matters! Users hate to use programs that are not responsive to interactions or run too slow to be useful. While becoming a programmer is simple enough, you require dedication and hard work to achieve an advanced level of programming proficiency where you know how to write fast code.This book begins by helping you explore algorithms and algorithmic complexity and continues by describing tools that can help you find slow parts of your code. Subsequent chapters will provide you with practical ideas about optimizing code by doing less work or doing it in a smarter way. The book also teaches you how to use optimized data structures from the Spring4D library, along with exploring data structures that are not part of the standard Delphi runtime library.The second part of the book talks about parallel programming. You’ll learn about the problems that only occur in multithreaded code and explore various approaches to fixing them effectively. The concluding chapters provide instructions on writing parallel code in different ways – by using basic threading support or focusing on advanced concepts such as tasks and parallel patterns.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned to look at your programs from a totally different perspective and will be equipped to effortlessly make your code faster than it is now.

Practical MongoDB Aggregations. The official guide to developing optimal aggregation pipelines with MongoDB 7.0

Paul Done, Asya Kamsky

Officially endorsed by MongoDB, Inc., Practical MongoDB Aggregations helps you unlock the full potential of the MongoDB aggregation framework, including the latest features of MongoDB 7.0. This book provides practical, easy-to-digest principles and approaches for increasing your effectiveness in developing aggregation pipelines, supported by examples for building pipelines to solve complex data manipulation and analytical tasks.This book is customized for developers, architects, data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists with some familiarity with the aggregation framework. It begins by explaining the framework's architecture and then shows you how to build pipelines optimized for productivity and scale.Given the critical role arrays play in MongoDB's document model, the book delves into best practices for optimally manipulating arrays. The latter part of the book equips you with examples to solve common data processing challenges so you can apply the lessons you've learned to practical situations. By the end of this MongoDB book, you’ll have learned how to utilize the MongoDB aggregation framework to streamline your data analysis and manipulation processes effectively.

Production Ready OpenStack - Recipes for Successful Environments. Production Ready OpenStack - Recipes for Successful Environments

Arthur Berezin

OpenStack is the most popular open source cloud platform used by organizations building internal private clouds and by public cloud providers. OpenStack is designed in a fully distributed architecture to provide Infrastructure as a Service, allowing us to maintain a massively scalable cloud infrastructure. OpenStack is developed by a vibrant community of open source developers who come from the largest software companies in the world.The book provides a comprehensive and practical guide to the multiple uses cases and configurations that OpenStack supports. This book simplifies the learning process by guiding you through how to install OpenStack in a single controller configuration.The book goes deeper into deploying OpenStack in a highly available configuration. You'll then configure Keystone Identity Services using LDAP, Active Directory, or the MySQL identity provider and configure a caching layer and SSL. After that, you will configure storage back-end providers for Glance and Cinder, which will include Ceph, NFS, Swift, and local storage. Then you will configure the Neutron networking service with provider network VLANs, and tenant network VXLAN and GRE.Also, you will configure Nova's Hypervisor with KVM, and QEMU emulation, and you will configure Nova's scheduler filters and weights. Finally, you will configure Horizon to use Apache HTTPD and SSL, and you will customize the dashboard's appearance.

Effective Platform Product Management. An effortless strategy and execution guide for product managers who want to scale their platform business model and grow their customer base

Tabassum Memon

Scaling a platform is a lot different than scaling a product. This is why product managers developing or transitioning to a platform model are often facing completely new challenges – both technical and strategic. But if you want to build the next Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, or a completely new type of platform, then you need to adopt a platform-first approach to change how you invent, develop, and market solutions. This is where Effective Product Platform Management comes in.This book addresses product management as a critical pillar of platform development. It'll help you understand the difference between traditional and modern product management for platforms and even decide whether the platform business model is the way to go for you.As you progress, you’ll be able to build the right platform strategy, define the MVP, and focus on ongoing backlog prioritization for successful platforms. This book will also walk you through the practical steps and guidelines that can ease your organization’s transition from linear products to platforms.By the end of this platform product management book, you’ll have learned the essential aspects of product management for building successful and scalable platforms. You’ll also have a clear understanding of the next steps you need to take to perfect and execute your new platform strategy – and take on the world.

Cybersecurity and Privacy Law Handbook. A beginner's guide to dealing with privacy and security while keeping hackers at bay

Walter Rocchi

Cybercriminals are incessantly coming up with new ways to compromise online systems and wreak havoc, creating an ever-growing need for cybersecurity practitioners in every organization across the globe who understand international security standards, such as the ISO27k family of standards.If you’re looking to ensure that your company's data conforms to these standards, Cybersecurity and Privacy Law Handbook has got you covered. It'll not only equip you with the rudiments of cybersecurity but also guide you through privacy laws and explain how you can ensure compliance to protect yourself from cybercrime and avoid the hefty fines imposed for non-compliance with standards.Assuming that you're new to the field, this book starts by introducing cybersecurity frameworks and concepts used throughout the chapters. You'll understand why privacy is paramount and how to find the security gaps in your company's systems. There's a practical element to the book as well—you'll prepare policies and procedures to prevent your company from being breached. You’ll complete your learning journey by exploring cloud security and the complex nature of privacy laws in the US.By the end of this cybersecurity book, you'll be well-placed to protect your company's data and comply with the relevant standards.

Customizing ASP.NET Core 6.0. Learn to turn the right screws to optimize ASP.NET Core applications for better performance - Second Edition

Jürgen Gutsch, Damien Bowden, Ed Price

ASP.NET Core is packed full of hidden features for building sophisticated web applications – but if you don’t know how to customize it, you’re not making the most of its capabilities. Customizing ASP.NET Core 6.0 is a book that will teach you all about tweaking the knobs at various layers and take experienced programmers’ skills to a new level.This updated second edition covers the latest features and changes in the .NET 6 LTS version, along with new insights and customization techniques for important topics such as authentication and authorization. You’ll also learn how to work with caches and change the default behavior of ASP.NET Core apps.This book will show you the essential concepts relating to tweaking the framework, such as configuration, dependency injection, routing, action filters, and more. As you progress, you'll be able to create custom solutions that meet the needs of your use case with ASP.NET Core. Later chapters will cover expert techniques and best practices for using the framework for your app development needs, from UI design to hosting. Finally, you'll focus on the new endpoint routing in ASP.NET Core to build custom endpoints and add third-party endpoints to your web apps for processing requests faster.By the end of this book, you'll be able to customize ASP.NET Core to develop better, more robust apps.

Getting Started with Drupal Commerce. Learn everything you need to know in order to get your first Drupal Commerce website set up and trading

Richard Jones

Drupal Commerce is emerging as the preferred option for open source e-commerce, and it also stands up to comparison against established proprietary systems.Getting Started with Drupal Commerce is an introductory guide to building an online store using Drupal Commerce in Drupal 7.Getting Started with Drupal Commerce takes you step-by-step through a complete e-commerce website build, from a clean installation of Drupal to a working example store. Starting with how to set up a Drupal development environment, we then discuss the planning of an e-commerce site and the typical questions you should be asking before getting started.Next, we walk through all of the essential setup required for most types of e-shop, including taxes, shipping, discounts and coupons, the checkout process, and backend order management. By the end of Getting Started with Drupal Commerce, you will be fully-equipped to plan and build your own store and you will understand the fundamental principles of Drupal Commerce that will enable you to progress to more complex store builds.

Highcharts Essentials. Create interactive data visualization charts with the Highcharts JavaScript library

Bilal Shahid

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) with OpenStack. Click here to enter text

Sreenivas Voruganti, Sriram Subramanian

Networking is one the pillars of OpenStack and OpenStack Networking are designed to support programmability and Software-Defined Networks. OpenStack Networking has been evolving from simple APIs and functionality in Quantum to more complex capabilities in Neutron.Armed with the basic knowledge, this book will help the readers to explore popular SDN technologies, namely, OpenDaylight (ODL), OpenContrail, Open Network Operating System (ONOS) and Open Virtual Network (OVN). The first couple of chapters will provide an overview of OpenStack Networking and SDN in general. Thereafter a set of chapters are devoted to OpenDaylight (ODL), OpenContrail and their integration with OpenStack Networking. The book then introduces you to Open Network Operating System (ONOS) which is fast becoming a carrier grade SDN platform. We will conclude the book with overview of upcoming SDN projects within OpenStack namely OVN and Dragonflow.By the end of the book, the readers will be familiar with SDN technologies and know how they can be leveraged in an OpenStack based cloud.

SQL for Data Analytics. Harness the power of SQL to extract insights from data - Third Edition

Jun Shan, Matt Goldwasser, Upom Malik, Benjamin Johnston

Every day, businesses operate around the clock, and a huge amount of data is generated at a rapid pace. This book helps you analyze this data and identify key patterns and behaviors that can help you and your business understand your customers at a deep, fundamental level.SQL for Data Analytics, Third Edition is a great way to get started with data analysis, showing how to effectively sort and process information from raw data, even without any prior experience.You will begin by learning how to form hypotheses and generate descriptive statistics that can provide key insights into your existing data. As you progress, you will learn how to write SQL queries to aggregate, calculate, and combine SQL data from sources outside of your current dataset. You will also discover how to work with advanced data types, like JSON. By exploring advanced techniques, such as geospatial analysis and text analysis, you will be able to understand your business at a deeper level. Finally, the book lets you in on the secret to getting information faster and more effectively by using advanced techniques like profiling and automation. By the end of this book, you will be proficient in the efficient application of SQL techniques in everyday business scenarios and looking at data with the critical eye of analytics professional. 

PowerShell: Automating Administrative Tasks. The art of automating and managing Windows environments

Michael Shepard, Chendrayan Venkatesan, Sherif Talaat, Brenton J.W. Blawat

Are you tired of managing Windows administrative tasks manually and are looking to automate the entire process? If yes, then this is the right course for you. This learning path starts your PowerShell journey and will help you automate the administration of the Windows operating system and applications that run on Windows. It will get you up and running with PowerShell, taking you from the basics of installation to writing scripts and performing web server automation. You will explore the PowerShell environment and discover how to use cmdlets, functions, and scripts to automate Windows systems. The next installment of the course focuses on gaining concrete knowledge of Windows PowerShell scripting to perform professional-level scripting. The techniques here are packed with PowerShell scripts and sample C# code to automate tasks. You will use .NET classes in PowerShell and C# to manage Exchange Online. In the final section, you will delve into real-world examples to learn how to simplify the management of your Windows environment. You will get to grips with PowerShell’s advanced functions and how to most effectively administer your system. 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: [*] Getting Started with PowerShell by Michael Shepard [*] Windows PowerShell for .Net Developers Second Edition by Chendrayan Venkatesan and Sherif Talaat[*] Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting by Brenton J.W. Blawat

Puppet: Mastering Infrastructure Automation

Jaime Soriano Pastor

Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control. It was written for and by system administrators to manage large numbers of systems efficiently and prevent configuration drifts. Puppet gives you control of what you do to each node, when you do it, and how you do it.This Learning Path will take you from the basics of Puppet to extending it and then mastering it. We will start off with a primer on Puppet, its installation and get a sneak peek under its hood. We will then move on to designing and deploying your Puppet architecture, learning best practices for writing reusable and maintainable code, and executing, testing, and deploying Puppet across your systems. Finally, we will deal with problems of scale and exceptions in your code, automate workflows, and support multiple developers working simultaneously.This course is based on the following books: 1)Puppet 4 Essentials - Second Edition 2)Extending Puppet - Second Edition 3)Mastering Puppet - Second Edition

Fuzzing Against the Machine. Automate vulnerability research with emulated IoT devices on QEMU

Antonio Nappa, Eduardo Blázquez, Nikias Bassen, Dr. Javier López-Gómez

Emulation and fuzzing are among the many techniques that can be used to improve cybersecurity; however, utilizing these efficiently can be tricky. Fuzzing Against the Machine is your hands-on guide to understanding how these powerful tools and techniques work. Using a variety of real-world use cases and practical examples, this book helps you grasp the fundamental concepts of fuzzing and emulation along with advanced vulnerability research, providing you with the tools and skills needed to find security flaws in your software.The book begins by introducing you to two open source fuzzer engines: QEMU, which allows you to run software for whatever architecture you can think of, and American fuzzy lop (AFL) and its improved version AFL++. You’ll learn to combine these powerful tools to create your own emulation and fuzzing environment and then use it to discover vulnerabilities in various systems, such as iOS, Android, and Samsung's Mobile Baseband software, Shannon. After reading the introductions and setting up your environment, you’ll be able to dive into whichever chapter you want, although the topics gradually become more advanced as the book progresses.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the skills, knowledge, and practice required to find flaws in any firmware by emulating and fuzzing it with QEMU and several fuzzing engines.

Node.js Design Patterns. Master best practices to build modular and scalable server-side web applications - Second Edition

Luciano Mammino, Mario Casciaro

Node.js is a massively popular software platform that lets you use JavaScript to easily create scalable server-side applications. It allows you to create efficient code, enabling a more sustainable way of writing software made of only one language across the full stack, along with extreme levels of reusability, pragmatism, simplicity, and collaboration. Node.js is revolutionizing the web and the way people and companies create their software.In this book, we will take you on a journey across various ideas and components, and the challenges you would commonly encounter while designing and developing software using the Node.js platform. You will also discover the Node.js way of dealing with design and coding decisions.The book kicks off by exploring the basics of Node.js describing it's asynchronous single-threaded architecture and the main design patterns. It then shows you how to master the asynchronous control flow patterns,and the stream component and it culminates into a detailed list of Node.js implementations of the most common design patterns as well as some specific design patterns that are exclusive to the Node.js world.Lastly, it dives into moreadvanced concepts such as Universal Javascript,and scalability' and it's meant to conclude the journey by giving the reader all the necessary concepts to be able to build an enterprise grade application using Node.js.

Mastering Adobe Photoshop Elements 2023. Bring out the best in your images using Adobe Photoshop Elements 2023 - Fifth Edition

Robin Nichols

Produce impressive, high-quality pictures to influence your audience, grow your brand, and market your products and services.With its impressive range of sophisticated creative capabilities, Adobe Photoshop Elements 2023 is all you need to create photos you’ll love to share. Elements 2023 extends its AI capabilities by simplifying complex editing processes. Learn to stitch widescreen panoramas, remove people from backgrounds, de-focus backgrounds, re-compose images, and even create a range of calendars and greeting cards for your friends and family.The fifth edition of this widely acclaimed series will help you master photo-editing from scratch. Start by learning basic edits such as auto tone correction, image resizing and cropping, then master contrast, color, sharpness, and clarity.Take your prowess to the next level by learning how to correct optical distortion, re-shape images, exploit layers, layer masking, and sharpening techniques—create the perfect picture or imaginative fantasy illustration. You’ll also learn the online realms of animation, video creation, and third-party plug-ins.By the end of this book, you'll learn how to leverage the incredible features of Photoshop Elements 2023 with complete confidence.Note: All the images featured in the book can be easily downloaded via a direct link or from the GitHub repository link specified in the Preface.

SAP HANA Cookbook. Your all-inclusive guide to understanding SAP HANA with practical recipes with over 50 recipes

Chandrasekhar Mankala (USD), Ganesh Mahadevan V., Ganesh Mahadevan (USD)

SAP HANA is a real-time applications platform that provides a multi-purpose, in-memory appliance. Decision makers in the organization can gain instant insight into business operations. Thus all the data available can be analysed and you can react to the changing business conditions rapidly to make decisions. The real-time platform not only empowers business users and top management to make decisions but also provides the capability to make decisions in real-time.A practical and comprehensive guide that helps you understand the power of SAP HANA’s real-time and in-memory capabilities. It also provides step-by-step instructions to exploit all the possible features of the SAP HANA database, enabling users to harness the full potential of this technology and its features.You will gain an understanding of real-time replications, effective data loading from various sources, how to load data, and how to create re-usable objects such as models and reports.Use this practical guide to enable or transform your business landscape by implementing SAP HANA to meet your business requirements. The book shows you how to load data from different types of systems, create models in SAP HANA, and consume data for decision-making. The book covers various tools at different stages creating models using SAP HANA Studio, and consuming data using reporting tools such as SAP BusinessObjects, SAP Lumira, and so on . This book also explains the in-depth architecture of SAP HANA to help you understand SAP HANA as an appliance, that is, a combination of hardware and software.The book covers the best practices to leverage SAP HANA’s in-memory technology to transform data into insightful information. It also covers technology landscaping, solution architecture, connectivity, data loading, and setting up the environment for modeling purpose (including setup of SAP HANA Studio).If you have an intention to start your career as SAP HANA Modeler, this book is the perfect start. 

Instant Hands-on Testing with PHPUnit How-to. A practical guide to getting started with PHPUnit to improve code quality

Michael Lively

No developer wants to accept the inherent difficulty of writing software as an excuse for not finding the bugs in our code before anyone else does. PHPUnit is a framework that was created to allow developers to solve that very problem. It provides a feature-rich environment with most of the tools necessary to provide adequate tests for any project.Instant Hands-on Testing with PHPUnit How-to provides a thorough overview of the functionality provided by the PHPUnit framework. It shows how the plethora of features in the framework can be used to write tests for real world projects to ensure they function and will continue to function in the ways that you expect.This book will show how you can set up the scaffolding necessary to run unit tests in your project with PHPUnit. It will walk you through the process of how to write a basic test and how to maintain your project's test suite. You will learn how to use some of the more advanced features of PHPUnit and then see how you can use mock objects to isolate the code you are testing. We will then discover how to create tests that verify your interaction with databases and even see how you can use PHPUnit to understand which code you are actually testing.At the end of the book you will have all of the basic understanding necessary to begin adding tests to your project. This book provides a great foundation for becoming a expert at writing unit tests.

Creating Stunning Dashboards with QlikView. Bring real business insights to your company through effective and engaging dashboards in QlikView

Julian Villafuerte

QlikView is one of the most powerful analytical tools in the market. Based on an in-memory associative model, it lets users freely navigate through the data, spot trends and make better decisions. This platform is capable of integrating a wide range of data sources like ERP systems, data warehouses or spreadsheets into a single application in order display dashboards with state-of-the-art visualizations.Creating Stunning Dashboards with QlikView is an easy to follow handbook that guides you through the process of creating an effective and engaging dashboard that delivers tangible value to the business. It starts with the identification of the business needs and the definition of the main KPIs, and takes you all the way to the application rollout.Throughout the book, you will learn how to apply some of the best practices in the field of data visualization, create a robust navigation schema, chose the best chart types for each scenario and many other things that will help you create effective dashboards that uncover all the stories behind the data.

Continuous Testing, Quality, Security, and Feedback. Essential strategies and secure practices for DevOps, DevSecOps, and SRE transformations

Marc Hornbeek, Dan Wakeman

Organizations struggle to integrate and execute continuous testing, quality, security, and feedback practices into their DevOps, DevSecOps, and SRE approaches to achieve successful digital transformations. This book addresses these challenges by embedding these critical practices into your software development lifecycle.Beginning with the foundational concepts, the book progresses to practical applications, helping you understand why these practices are crucial in today’s fast-paced software development landscape. You’ll discover continuous strategies to avoid the common pitfalls and streamline the quality, security, and feedback mechanisms within software development processes. You’ll explore planning, discovery, and benchmarking through systematic engineering approaches, tailored to organizational needs. You’ll learn how to select toolchains, integrating AI/ML for resilience, and implement real-world case studies to achieve operational excellence. You’ll learn how to create strategic roadmaps, aligned with digital transformation goals, and measure outcomes recognized by DORA. You’ll explore emerging trends that are reshaping continuous practices in software development.By the end of this book, you’ll have the knowledge and skills to drive continuous improvement across the software development lifecycle.