Mastering UI Development with Unity. An in-depth guide to developing engaging user interfaces with Unity 5, Unity 2017, and Unity 2018

Ashley Godbold

A functional UI is an important component for player interaction in every type of video game. Along with imparting crucial statistical information to the player, the UI is also the window through which the player engages with the world established by the game. Unity's tools give you the opportunity to create complex and attractive UIs to make your game stand out.This book helps you realize the full potential of Unity's powerful tools to create the best UI for your games by walking you through the creation of myriad user interface components.Learn how to create visually engaging heads-up-displays, pause menus, health bars, circular progress bars, animated menus, and more. This book not only teaches how to lay out visual elements, but also how to program these features and implement them across multiple games of varying genres.While working through the examples provided, you will learn how to develop a UI that scales to multiple screen resolutions, so your game can be released on multiple platforms with minimal changes.

Windows Presentation Foundation Development Cookbook. 100 recipes to build rich desktop client applications on Windows

Kunal Chowdhury

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is Microsoft's development tool for building rich Windows client user experiences that incorporate UIs, media, and documents. With the updates in .NET 4.7, Visual Studio 2017, C# 7, and .NET Standard 2.0, WPF has taken giant strides and is now easier than ever for developers to use. If you want to get an in-depth view of WPF mechanics and capabilities, then this book is for you.The book begins by teaching you about the fundamentals of WPF and then quickly shows you the standard controls and the layout options. It teaches you about data bindings and how to utilize resources and the MVVM pattern to maintain a clean and reusable structure in your code. After this, you will explore the animation capabilities of WPF and see how they integrate with other mechanisms. Towards the end of the book, you will learn about WCF services and explore WPF's support for debugging and asynchronous operations.By the end of the book, you will have a deep understanding of WPF and will know how to build resilient applications.

Effective Business Intelligence with QuickSight. Boost your business IQ with Amazon QuickSight

Rajesh Nadipalli

Amazon QuickSight is the next-generation Business Intelligence (BI) cloud service that can help you build interactive visualizations on top of various data sources hosted on Amazon Cloud Infrastructure. QuickSight delivers responsive insights into big data and enables organizations to quickly democratize data visualizations and scale to hundreds of users at a fraction of the cost when compared to traditional BI tools.This book begins with an introduction to Amazon QuickSight, feature differentiators from traditional BI tools, and how it fits in the overall AWS big data ecosystem. With practical examples, you will find tips and techniques to load your data to AWS, prepare it, and finally visualize it using QuickSight. You will learn how to build interactive charts, reports, dashboards, and stories using QuickSight and share with others using just your browser and mobile app.The book also provides a blueprint to build a real-life big data project on top of AWS Data Lake Solution and demonstrates how to build a modern data lake on the cloud with governance, data catalog, and analysis. It reviews the current product shortcomings, features in the roadmap, and how to provide feedback to AWS.Grow your profits, improve your products, and beat your competitors.

CompTIA Project+ Certification Guide. Learn project management best practices and successfully pass the CompTIA Project+ PK0-004 exam

J. Ashley Hunt

The CompTIA Project+ exam is designed for IT professionals who want to improve their career trajectory by gaining certification in project management specific to their industry. This guide covers everything necessary to pass the current iteration of the Project+ PK0-004 exam.The CompTIA Project+ Certification Guide starts by covering project initiation best practices, including an understanding of organizational structures, team roles, and responsibilities. You’ll then study best practices for developing a project charter and the scope of work to produce deliverables necessary to obtain formal approval of the end result. The ability to monitor your project work and make changes as necessary to bring performance back in line with the plan is the difference between a successful and unsuccessful project. The concluding chapters of the book provide best practices to help keep an eye on your projects and close them out successfully. The guide also includes practice questions created to mirror the exam experience and help solidify your understanding of core project management concepts.By the end of this book, you will be able to develop creative solutions for complex issues faced in project management.

Hands-On Red Team Tactics. A practical guide to mastering Red Team operations

Himanshu Sharma, Harpreet Singh

Red Teaming is used to enhance security by performing simulated attacks on an organization in order to detect network and system vulnerabilities. Hands-On Red Team Tactics starts with an overview of pentesting and Red Teaming, before giving you an introduction to few of the latest pentesting tools. We will then move on to exploring Metasploit and getting to grips with Armitage. Once you have studied the fundamentals, you will learn how to use Cobalt Strike and how to set up its team server.The book introduces some common lesser known techniques for pivoting and how to pivot over SSH, before using Cobalt Strike to pivot. This comprehensive guide demonstrates advanced methods of post-exploitation using Cobalt Strike and introduces you to Command and Control (C2) servers and redirectors. All this will help you achieve persistence using beacons and data exfiltration, and will also give you the chance to run through the methodology to use Red Team activity tools such as Empire during a Red Team activity on Active Directory and Domain Controller.In addition to this, you will explore maintaining persistent access, staying untraceable, and getting reverse connections over different C2 covert channels.By the end of this book, you will have learned about advanced penetration testing tools, techniques to get reverse shells over encrypted channels, and processes for post-exploitation.

Learn Blockchain Programming with JavaScript. Build your very own Blockchain and decentralized network with JavaScript and Node.js

Eric Traub

Learn Blockchain Programming with JavaScript begins by giving you a clear understanding of what blockchain technology is. You’ll then set up an environment to build your very own blockchain and you’ll add various functionalities to it. By adding functionalities to your blockchain such as the ability to mine new blocks, create transactions, and secure your blockchain through a proof-of-work you’ll gain an in-depth understanding of how blockchain technology functions.As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll learn how to build an API server to interact with your blockchain and how to host your blockchain on a decentralized network. You’ll also build a consensus algorithm and use it to verify data and keep the entire blockchain network synchronized. In the concluding chapters, you’ll finish building your blockchain prototype and gain a thorough understanding of why blockchain technology is so secure and valuable. By the end of this book, you'll understand how decentralized blockchain networks function and why decentralization is such an important feature for securing a blockchain.

Implementing Oracle API Platform Cloud Service. Design, deploy, and manage your APIs in Oracle’s new API Platform

Andrew Bell, Sander Rensen, Luis Weir, Phil Wilkins

Implementing Oracle API Platform Cloud Service moves from theory to practice using the newest Oracle API management platform. This critical new platform for Oracle developers allows you to interface the complex array of services your clients expect in the modern world.First, you'll learn about Oracle’s new platform and get an overview of it, then you'll see a use case showing the functionality and use of this new platform for Oracle customers. Next, you’ll see the power of Apiary and begin designing your own APIs. From there, you’ll build and run microservices and set up the Oracle API gateways. Moving on, you’ll discover how to customize the developer portal and publish your own APIs. You’ll spend time looking at configuration management on the new platform, and implementing the Oauth 2.0 policy, as well as custom policies. The latest finance modules from Oracle will be examined, with some of the third party alternatives in sight as well.This broad-scoped book completes your journey with a clear examination of how to transition APIs from Oracle API Management 12c to the new Oracle API Platform, so that you can step into the future confidently.

Hybrid Mobile Development with Ionic. Building highly interactive mobile apps

Gaurav Saini

Ionic is an open source, front-end framework that allows you to develop hybrid mobile apps without any native-language hassle for each platform. It offers a library of mobile-optimized HTML, CSS, and JS components for building highly interactive mobile apps.This book will help you to develop a complete, professional and quality mobile application with Ionic Framework. You will start the journey by learning to configure, customize, and migrate Ionic 1x to 3x. Then, you will move on to Ionic 3 components and see how you can customize them according to your applications. You will also implement various native plugins and integrate them with Ionic and Ionic Cloud services to use them optimally in your application. By this time, you will be able to create a full-fledged e-commerce application. Next, you will master authorization, authentication, and security techniques in Ionic 3 to ensure that your application and data are secure. Further, you will integrate the backend services such as Firebase and the Cordova iBeacon plugin in your application. Lastly, you will be looking into Progressive Web Applications and its support with Ionic, with a demonstration of an offline-first application.By the end of the book, you will not only have built a professional, hybrid mobile application, but will also have ensured that your app is secure and performance driven.

Introduction to JVM Languages. Get familiar with the world of Java, Scala, Clojure, Kotlin, and Groovy

Vincent van der Leun

Anyone who knows software development knows about the Java Virtual Machine. The Java Virtual Machine is responsible for interpreting Java byte code and translating it into actions. In the beginning, Java was the only programming language used for the JVM. But increasing complexity of the language and the remarkable performance of the JVM created an opening for a new generation of programming languages. If you want to build a strong foundation with the Java Virtual Machine and get started with popular modern programming languages, then this book is for you.The book will begin with a general introduction of the JVM and its features, which are common to the JVM languages, helping you get abreast with its concepts. It will then dive into explaining languages such as Java, Scala, Clojure, Kotlin, and Groovy and will show how to work with each language, their features, use cases, and pros and cons. By writing example projects in those languages and focusing on each language’s strong points, it will help you find the programming language that is most appropriate for your particular needs. By the end of the book, you will have written multiple programs that run on the Java Virtual Machine and know about the differences between the various languages.

Expert Android Programming. Master skills to build enterprise grade Android applications

Prajyot Mainkar

Android O brings a number of important changes for the users as well as the developers. If you want to create smart android applications which are fast, lightweight and also highly efficient then this is the book that will solve all your problems. You will create a complex enterprise grade app in this book. You will get a quick refresher of the latest android SDK and how to configure your development environment. Then you will move onto creating app layouts, component and module building, creating smart and efficient UIs. The most important part of a modern day app is how real time they are. With this book, you will create a smooth back-end for your app, ensure dynamic and real time communication between different app layers. As we move on, you will learn to leverage the different Android APIs and create an efficient SQLite data layer for your apps. You will implement effective testing techniques to make your app reliable and robust and finally you will learn to deploy it efficiently. The multiple stages of android development will also be simplified by giving you an industry standard set of best practices.

Practical Internet of Things with JavaScript. Build standalone exciting IoT projects with Raspberry Pi 3 and JavaScript (ES5/ES6)

Arvind Ravulavaru

In this world of technology upgrades, IoT is currently leading with its promise to make the world a more smarter and efficient place.This book will show you how to build simple IoT solutions that will help you to understand how this technology works. We would not only explore the IoT solution stack, but we will also see how to do it with the world’s most misunderstood programming language - JavaScript. Using Raspberry Pi 3 and JavaScript (ES5/ES6) as the base to build all the projects, you will begin with learning about the fundamentals of IoT and then build a standard framework for developing all the applications covered in this book. You will then move on to build a weather station with temperature, humidity and moisture sensors and further integrate Alexa with it. Further, you will build a smart wearable for understanding the concept of fall detection. You will then extend it with the 'If This Then That' (IFTTT) rules engine to send an email on fall detection. Finally, you will be working with the Raspberry Pi 3 camera module and surveillance with a bit of facial detection using Amazon Rekognition platform.At the end of the book, you will not only be able to build standalone exciting IoT applications but also learn how you can extend your projects to another level.

PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook. Mastering query optimization, database monitoring, and performance-tuning for PostgreSQL

Chitij Chauhan, Dinesh Kumar

PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful and easy to use database management systems. It has strong support from the community and is being actively developed with a new release every year. PostgreSQL supports the most advanced features included in SQL standards. It also provides NoSQL capabilities and very rich data types and extensions. All of this makes PostgreSQL a very attractive solution in software systems.If you run a database, you want it to perform well and you want to be able to secure it. As the world’s most advanced open source database, PostgreSQL has unique built-in ways to achieve these goals. This book will show you a multitude of ways to enhance your database’s performance and give you insights into measuring and optimizing a PostgreSQL database to achieve better performance. This book is your one-stop guide to elevate your PostgreSQL knowledge to the next level. First, you’ll get familiarized with essential developer/administrator concepts such as load balancing, connection pooling, and distributing connections to multiple nodes. Next, you will explore memory optimization techniques before exploring the security controls offered by PostgreSQL. Then, you will move on to the essential database/server monitoring and replication strategies with PostgreSQL. Finally, you will learn about query processing algorithms.

Git Essentials. Create, merge, and distribute code with Git, the most powerful and flexible versioning system available - Second Edition

Ferdinando Santacroce

Since its inception, Git has attracted skilled developers due to its robust, powerful, and reliable features. Its incredibly fast branching ability transformed a piece of code from a niche tool for Linux Kernel developers into a mainstream distributed versioning system. Like most powerful tools, Git can be hard to approach since it has a lot of commands, subcommands, and options that easily confuse newcomers.The 2nd edition of this very successful book will help you overcome this fear and become adept in all the basic tasks in Git. Building upon the success of the first book, we start with a brief step-by-step installation guide; after this, you'll delve into the essentials of Git. For those of you who have bought the first edition, this time we go into internals in far greater depth, talking less about theory and using much more practical examples.The book serves as a primer for topics to follow, such as branching and merging, creating and managing a GitHub personal repository, and fork and pull requests. You’ll then learn the art of cherry-picking, taking only the commits you want, followed by Git blame. Finally, we'll see how to interoperate with a Subversion server, covering the concepts and commands needed to convert an SVN repository into a Git repository.To conclude, this is a collection of resources, links, and appendices to satisfy even the most curious.

Hands-On Bug Hunting for Penetration Testers. A practical guide to help ethical hackers discover web application security flaws

Joe Marshall

Bug bounties have quickly become a critical part of the security economy. This book shows you how technical professionals with an interest in security can begin productively—and profitably—participating in bug bounty programs.You will learn about SQli, NoSQLi, XSS, XXE, and other forms of code injection. You’ll see how to create CSRF PoC HTML snippets, how to discover hidden content (and what to do with it once it’s found), and how to create the tools for automated pentesting work?ows.Then, you’ll format all of this information within the context of a bug report that will have the greatest chance of earning you cash. With detailed walkthroughs that cover discovering, testing, and reporting vulnerabilities, this book is ideal for aspiring security professionals. You should come away from this work with the skills you need to not only find the bugs you're looking for, but also the best bug bounty programs to participate in, and how to grow your skills moving forward in freelance security research.

Learn PowerShell Core 6.0. Automate and control administrative tasks using DevOps principles

David das Neves, Jan-Hendrik Peters

Beginning with an overview of the different versions of PowerShell, Learn PowerShell Core 6.0 introduces you to VSCode and then dives into helping you understand the basic techniques in PowerShell scripting. You will cover advanced coding techniques, learn how to write reusable code as well as store and load data with PowerShell.This book will help you understand PowerShell security and Just Enough Administration, enabling you to create your own PowerShell repository. The last set of chapters will guide you in setting up, configuring, and working with Release Pipelines in VSCode and VSTS, and help you understand PowerShell DSC. In addition to this, you will learn how to use PowerShell with Windows, Azure, Microsoft Online Services, SCCM, and SQL Server. The final chapter will provide you with some use cases and pro tips.By the end of this book, you will be able to create professional reusable code using security insight and knowledge of working with PowerShell Core 6.0 and its most important capabilities.

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

Windows Server 2016 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook. Powerful ways to automate and manage Windows administrative tasks - Second Edition

Thomas Lee, Ed Goad

This book showcases several ways that Windows administrators can use to automate and streamline their job. You'll start with the PowerShell and Windows Server fundamentals, where you'll become well versed with PowerShell and Windows Server features.In the next module, Core Windows Server 2016, you'll implement Nano Server, manage Windows updates, and implement troubleshooting and server inventories. You'll then move on to the Networking module, where you'll manage Windows network services and network shares.The last module covers Azure and DSC, where you will use Azure on PowerShell and DSC to easily maintain Windows servers.

Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow. Teach language to machines using Python's deep learning library

Thushan Ganegedara

Natural language processing (NLP) supplies the majority of data available to deep learning applications, while TensorFlow is the most important deep learning framework currently available. Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow brings TensorFlow and NLP together to give you invaluable tools to work with the immense volume of unstructured data in today’s data streams, and apply these tools to specific NLP tasks.Thushan Ganegedara starts by giving you a grounding in NLP and TensorFlow basics. You'll then learn how to use Word2vec, including advanced extensions, to create word embeddings that turn sequences of words into vectors accessible to deep learning algorithms. Chapters on classical deep learning algorithms, like convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN), demonstrate important NLP tasks as sentence classification and language generation. You will learn how to apply high-performance RNN models, like long short-term memory (LSTM) cells, to NLP tasks. You will also explore neural machine translation and implement a neural machine translator.After reading this book, you will gain an understanding of NLP and you'll have the skills to apply TensorFlow in deep learning NLP applications, and how to perform specific NLP tasks.

Server-Side Enterprise Development with Angular. Use Angular Universal to pre-render your web pages, improving SEO and application UX

Bram Borggreve

With the help of Server-Side Enterprise Development with Angular, equip yourself with the skills required to create modern, progressive web applications that load quickly and efficiently. This fast-paced book is a great way to learn how to build an effective UX by using the new features of Angular 7 beta, without wasting efforts in searching for referrals.To start off, you'll install Angular CLI and set up a working environment, followed by learning to distinguish between the container and presentational components. You'll explore advanced concepts such as making requests to a REST API from an Angular application, creating a web server using Node.js and Express, and adding dynamic metadata. You'll also understand how to implement and configure a service worker using Angular PWA and deploy the server-side rendered app to the cloud.By the end of this book, you'll have developed skills to serve your users views that load instantly, while reaping all the SEO benefits of improved page indexing.

ROS Robotics Projects. Make your robots see, sense, and interact with cool and engaging projects with Robotic Operating System

Lentin Joseph

Robot Operating System is one of the most widely used software frameworks for robotic research and for companies to model, simulate, and prototype robots. Applying your knowledge of ROS to actual robotics is much more difficult than people realize, but this title will give you what you need to create your own robotics in no time!This book is packed with over 14 ROS robotics projects that can be prototyped without requiring a lot of hardware. The book starts with an introduction of ROS and its installation procedure. After discussing the basics, you’ll be taken through great projects, such as building a self-driving car, an autonomous mobile robot, and image recognition using deep learning and ROS. You can find ROS robotics applications for beginner, intermediate, and expert levels inside!This book will be the perfect companion for a robotics enthusiast who really wants to do something big in the field.

Managing Mission - Critical Domains and DNS. Demystifying nameservers, DNS, and domain names

Mark E.Jeftovic

Managing your organization's naming architecture and mitigating risks within complex naming environments is very important. This book will go beyond looking at “how to run a name server” or “how to DNSSEC sign a domain”, Managing Mission Critical Domains & DNS looks across the entire spectrum of naming; from external factors that exert influence on your domains to all the internal factors to consider when operating your DNS. The readers are taken on a comprehensive guided tour through the world of naming: from understanding the role of registrars and how they interact with registries, to what exactly is it that ICANN does anyway? Once the prerequisite knowledge of the domain name ecosystem is acquired, the readers are taken through all aspects of DNS operations. Whether your organization operates its own nameservers or utilizes an outsourced vendor, or both, we examine the complex web of interlocking factors that must be taken into account but are too frequently overlooked. By the end of this book, our readers will have an end to end to understanding of all the aspects covered in DNS name servers.

Microsoft HoloLens By Example. Create immersive Augmented Reality experiences

Joshua Newnham

Are you a developer who is fascinated with Microsoft HoloLens and its capabilities? Do you want to learn the intricacies of working with the HoloLens SDK and create your own apps? If so, this is the book for you.This book introduces and demystifies the HoloLens platform and introduces new ways you can interact with computers (Mixed Reality). It will teach you the important concepts, get you excited about the possibilities, and give you the tools to continue exploring and experimenting. You will go through the journey of creating four independent examples throughout the book, two using DirectX and two using Unity. You will learn to implement spatial mapping and gesture control, incorporate spatial sound, and work with different types of input and gaze. You will also learn to use the Unity 5 SDK for HoloLens and create apps with it. Collectively, the apps explore the major concepts of HoloLens, but each app is independent, giving you the flexibility to choose where to start (and end).

Angular Router. From Angular core team member and creator of the router

Victor Savkin

Managing state transitions is one of the hardest parts of building applications. This is especially true on the web, where you also need to ensure that the state is reflected in the URL. In addition, you might want to split applications into multiple bundles and load them on demand. Doing this transparently isn’t easy. The Angular router solves these problems. Using the router, you can declaratively specify application states, manage state transitions while taking care of the URL, and load bundles on demand.This book is a complete description of the Angular router written by its designer. It goes far beyond a how-to-get-started guide and talks about the library in depth. The mental model, design constraints, and the subtleties of the API-everything is covered. You’ll learn in detail how to use the router in your own applications. Predominantly, you’ll understand the inner workings of the router and how you can configure it to work with any edge cases you come across in your sites.Throughout the book, you’ll see examples from real-world use in the MailApp application. You can view the full source of this application and see how the router code works to manage the state of the application and define what is visible on screen. Reading this book will give you deep insights into why the router works the way it does and will make you an Angular router expert.

Mastering Java for Data Science. Analytics and more for production-ready applications

Alexey Grigorev

Java is the most popular programming language, according to the TIOBE index, and it is a typical choice for running production systems in many companies, both in the startup world and among large enterprises.Not surprisingly, it is also a common choice for creating data science applications: it is fast and has a great set of data processing tools, both built-in and external. What is more, choosing Java for data science allows you to easily integrate solutions with existing software, and bring data science into production with less effort.This book will teach you how to create data science applications with Java. First, we will revise the most important things when starting a data science application, and then brush up the basics of Java and machine learning before diving into more advanced topics. We start by going over the existing libraries for data processing and libraries with machine learning algorithms. After that, we cover topics such as classification and regression, dimensionality reduction and clustering, information retrieval and natural language processing, and deep learning and big data.Finally, we finish the book by talking about the ways to deploy the model and evaluate it in production settings.