Mastering Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021. Boost your image-editing skills using the latest tools and techniques in Adobe Photoshop Elements - Third Edition

Robin Nichols

Managing thousands of images while producing perfectly edited results is now a must-have skill for online bloggers, influencers, vloggers, social media users, and photography enthusiasts. Photoshop Elements helps you to manage this easily and boost your creative output.This third edition is updated with Elements 2021’s latest features and focuses on Adobe's AI-powered features along with the entire creative workflow. Each chapter is designed to help you get the most out of your image files in an easy way. You’ll learn how to add significant visual improvements to your work using no more than a few one-click edits with AI-driven features and manual adjustments. The book is filled with useful instructions to guide you seamlessly through the often complex processes, tools, and features in Photoshop Elements. Finally, you’ll cover everything from developing your organizational skills through to creating remarkable special effects, complex text, image combinations, and eye-popping visual techniques using both AI-driven features as well as manually operated tools.By the end of this Photoshop Elements book, you'll have learned how to leverage the impressive tools available in Photoshop Elements 2021, and use them to greatly improve your photo editing and image retouching skills.

VMware vSphere Design Essentials. Unleash the performance, availability, and workload efficiency of your virtual data center using this fast-paced guide

Swapnil A Kambli, Puthiyavan Udayakumar

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Customization & Configuration (MB2-866) Certification Guide. A practical guide to customizing and configuring Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 focused on helping you pass the certification exam

Neil Benson

Whether you are a consultant for a Microsoft partner, an IT professional, a developer working for a Microsoft customer, or a freelance CRM consultant; this book is the ticket to advancing your career. Stand out in the crowd by obtaining certification MB2-866 Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Customization and Configuration.The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Customization & Configuration (MB2-866) Certification Guide covers the official course syllabus including all the topics and procedures you need to know to pass the exam. 'Test Your Knowledge' sections at the end of each chapter offer a 75-question sample exam to help you practice and master the certification test.The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Customization & Configuration (MB2-866) Certification Guide covers the official syllabus for course 80294B including a 75-question practice exam.If you're new to Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Microsoft certifications then the book kicks off with an overview of both topics before diving into the official syllabus. There are in-depth chapters covering customization basics, the organization structure, entity and attribute customization, entity relationships, user interface customization, auditing, and solutions. Each chapter includes detailed procedures that you need to know for the exam as well as a self-test section to review your learning.Microsoft endorses IT pros and developers who've proven their expertise by attaining the certification. Use this book to supercharge your career by giving yourself an advantage. Stand out in the crowd!

Mastering Roblox Coding. The unofficial guide to leveling up your Roblox scripting skills and building games using Luau programming

Mark Kiepe

Roblox is a game platform with over 47 million daily active users. Something unique to Roblox is that you’re playing games made by other gamers! This means that you can make your own games, even if you have no experience. In addition, Roblox provides a free engine that allows you to create and publish a simple game in less than five minutes and get paid while at it.Most Roblox games require programming. This book starts with the basics of programming in Roblox Luau. Each chapter builds on the previous one, which eventually results in you mastering programming concepts in Lua. Next, the book teaches you complex technologies that you can implement in your game. Each concept is explained clearly and uses simple examples that show you how the technology is being used. This book contains additional exercises for you to experiment with the concepts you’ve learned. Using best practices, you will understand how to write and build complex systems such as databases, user input controls, and all device user interfaces. In addition, you will learn how to build an entire game from scratch.By the end of this book, you will be able to program complex systems in Roblox from the ground up by learning how to write code using Luau and create optimized code.

Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching. Engaging online language learning activities using the Moodle platform

Jeff Stanford, Moodle Trust

That word Moodle keeps cropping up all over the place ñ it's in the newspapers, on other teachers' tongues, in more and more articles. Do you want to find out more about it yourself and learn how to create all sorts of fun and useful online language activities with it? Your search ends right here.This book demystifies Moodle and provides you with answers to your queries. It helps you create engaging online language learning activities using the Moodle platform. It has suggestions and fully working examples for adapting classroom activities to the Virtual Learning Environment.This book breaks down the core components of a typical language syllabus ñ speaking, pronunciation, listening, reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar, and assessment ñ and shows you how to use Moodle 1.9 to create complete, usable activities that practise them. Each chapter starts with activities that are easier to set up and progresses to more complex ones. Nevertheless, it's a recipe book so each activity is independent. We start off with a brief introduction to Moodle so that you're ready to deal with those specific syllabus topics, and conclude with building extended activities that combine all syllabus elements, making your course attractive and effective. Building activities based on the models in this book, you will develop the confidence to set up your own Moodle site with impressive results.

Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 Cookbook. For beginners or intermediate users this is a highly practical cookbook for Microsoft Dynamics GP. Now you can really get to grips with enterprise resource planning by engaging with real-world solutions through recipes and screenshots

Mark Polino, Ian Grieve

Microsoft Dynamics GP is an enterprise resource planning system, essentially an accounting system on steroids, designed for mid-sized organizations. The implementation of Dynamics GP is usually considered to be complex, and people often realize there must be more efficient ways of working with the system. This book will show readers how to improve their use of Dynamics GP and get the most out of this tool quickly and effectively.Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 Cookbook picks up where implementation training leaves off. Whether you are new or experienced you will find useful recipes for improving the way you use and work with Dynamics GP. The clear recipe steps and screenshots make implementing these solutions easy for users of any level and will be sure to improve your efficiency with the Dynamics GP 2013 system.The book starts with recipes designed to enhance the usefulness of Microsoft Dynamics GP by personalizing the look and feel of the application. Most of the recipes are designed to give tips for a typical installation of Dynamics GP, including core financials and distribution modules. The book then moves through recipes that include automating Dynamics GP to allow users or administrators to focus on value adding tasks, harnessing the power of SmartLists to leverage both simplicity and power, connecting Dynamics GP to Microsoft Office 2013, exposing hidden features in Dynamics GP, and much more!Through the final chapters, the book covers system maintenance and extending Dynamics GP with the Support Debugging Tool and Professional Services Tools Library.

Arduino BLINK Blueprints. Get the most out of your Arduino to develop exciting and creative LED-based projects

Samarth Shah, Utsav Shah

Arduino is an open-source prototyping platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. Arduino has been used in thousands of different projects and applications by a wide range of programmers and artists, and their contributions have added up to an incredible amount of accessible knowledge that can be of great help to novices and experts alike.Want to build exciting LED projects with Arduino? This book will be your companion to bring out the creative genius in you. To begin with, you will get introduced to the maker movement and the open source hardware development Arduino boards. You will then move on to develop a mood lamp and a remote-controlled TV backlight. As you progress through the book, you will develop an LED cube and will learn to use sound visualization to develop a sound-controlled LED Christmas tree. You will then move on to build a persistence of vision wand.At the end of each chapter, you’ll see some common problems, their solutions, and some workarounds.

PostgreSQL 13 Cookbook. Over 120 recipes to build high-performance and fault-tolerant PostgreSQL database solutions

Vallarapu Naga Avinash Kumar

PostgreSQL has become the most advanced open source database on the market. This book follows a step-by-step approach, guiding you effectively in deploying PostgreSQL in production environments.The book starts with an introduction to PostgreSQL and its architecture. You’ll cover common and not-so-common challenges faced while designing and managing the database. Next, the book focuses on backup and recovery strategies to ensure your database is steady and achieves optimal performance. Throughout the book, you’ll address key challenges such as maintaining reliability, data integrity, a fault-tolerant environment, a robust feature set, extensibility, consistency, and authentication. Moving ahead, you’ll learn how to manage a PostgreSQL cluster and explore replication features for high availability. Later chapters will assist you in building a secure PostgreSQL server, along with covering recipes for encrypting data in motion and data at rest. Finally, you’ll not only discover how to tune your database for optimal performance but also understand ways to monitor and manage maintenance activities, before learning how to perform PostgreSQL upgrades during downtime.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with the essential PostgreSQL 13 features to build enterprise relational databases.

Amazon Redshift Cookbook. Recipes for building modern data warehousing solutions

Shruti Worlikar, Thiyagarajan Arumugam, Harshida Patel, Eugene Kawamoto

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale AWS cloud data warehousing service. It enables you to build new data warehouse workloads on AWS and migrate on-premises traditional data warehousing platforms to Redshift.This book on Amazon Redshift starts by focusing on Redshift architecture, showing you how to perform database administration tasks on Redshift. You'll then learn how to optimize your data warehouse to quickly execute complex analytic queries against very large datasets. Because of the massive amount of data involved in data warehousing, designing your database for analytical processing lets you take full advantage of Redshift's columnar architecture and managed services. As you advance, you’ll discover how to deploy fully automated and highly scalable extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes, which help minimize the operational efforts that you have to invest in managing regular ETL pipelines and ensure the timely and accurate refreshing of your data warehouse. Finally, you'll gain a clear understanding of Redshift use cases, data ingestion, data management, security, and scaling so that you can build a scalable data warehouse platform.By the end of this Redshift book, you'll be able to implement a Redshift-based data analytics solution and have understood the best practice solutions to commonly faced problems.

IoT and OT Security Handbook. Assess risks, manage vulnerabilities, and monitor threats with Microsoft Defender for IoT

Smita Jain, Vasantha Lakshmi, Dr Rohini Srivathsa

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0, is all about digital transformation, manufacturing, and production. The connected world we live in today, including industries, comes with several cybersecurity challenges that need immediate attention. This book takes you through the basics of IoT and OT architecture and helps you understand and mitigate these security challenges.The book begins with an overview of the challenges faced in managing and securing IoT and OT devices in Industry 4.0. You’ll then get to grips with the Purdue model of reference architecture, which will help you explore common cyber attacks in IoT and OT environments. As you progress, you’ll be introduced to Microsoft Defender for IoT and understand its capabilities in securing IoT and OT environments. Finally, you will discover best practices for achieving continuous monitoring and vulnerability management, as well as threat monitoring and hunting, and find out how to align your business model toward zero trust.By the end of this security book, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge and skills to efficiently secure IoT and OT environments using Microsoft Defender for IoT.

Mastering Clojure. Understand the philosophy of the Clojure language and dive into its inner workings to unlock its advanced features, methodologies, and constructs

Akhil Wali

Clojure is a general-purpose language from the Lisp family with an emphasis on functional programming. It has some interesting concepts and features such as immutability, gradual typing, thread-safe concurrency primitives, and macro-based metaprogramming, which makes it a great choice to create modern, performant, and scalable applications.Mastering Clojure gives you an insight into the nitty-gritty details and more advanced features of the Clojure programming language to create more scalable, maintainable, and elegant applications. You’ll start off by learning the details of sequences, concurrency primitives, and macros. Packed with a lot of examples, you’ll get a walkthrough on orchestrating concurrency and parallelism, which will help you understand Clojure reducers, and we’ll walk through composing transducers so you know about functional composition and process transformation inside out. We also explain how reducers and transducers can be used to handle data in a more performant manner. Later on, we describe how Clojure also supports other programming paradigms such as pure functional programming and logic programming. Furthermore, you’ll level up your skills by taking advantage of Clojure's powerful macro system. Parallel, asynchronous, and reactive programming techniques are also described in detail. Lastly, we’ll show you how to test and troubleshoot your code to speed up your development cycles and allow you to deploy the code faster.

QGIS By Example. Leverage the power of QGIS in real-world applications to become a powerful user in cartography and GIS analysis

Alexander Bruy, Daria Svidzinska

Active Directory Administration Cookbook. Actionable, proven solutions to identity management and authentication on servers and in the cloud

Sander Berkouwer

Active Directory is an administration system for Windows administrators to automate network, security and access management tasks in the Windows infrastructure.This book starts off with a detailed focus on forests, domains, trusts, schemas and partitions. Next, you'll learn how to manage domain controllers, organizational units and the default containers. Going forward, you'll explore managing Active Directory sites as well as identifying and solving replication problems. The next set of chapters covers the different components of Active Directory and discusses the management of users, groups and computers. You'll also work through recipes that help you manage your Active Directory domains, manage user and group objects and computer accounts, expiring group memberships and group Managed Service Accounts (gMSAs) with PowerShell. You'll understand how to work with Group Policy and how to get the most out of it. The last set of chapters covers federation, security and monitoring. You will also learn about Azure Active Directory and how to integrate on-premises Active Directory with Azure AD. You'll discover how Azure AD Connect synchronization works, which will help you manage Azure AD.By the end of the book, you have learned about Active Directory and Azure AD in detail.

Multiplayer Game Development with Unreal Engine 5. Create compelling multiplayer games with C++, Blueprints, and Unreal Engine's networking features

Marco Secchi

If you’re fascinated by the immersive gaming experiences that enable multiple users to engage in collaborative or competitive gameplay, this Unreal Engine 5 game development book is for you.In this book, you’ll learn the foundational principles behind multiplayer games. Starting with a sample project, you’ll learn how to set up a networked system and make it work. Once the prototype of the project is functional, you’ll start adding game logic, including obstacles and AI opponents, to heighten the challenges and engagement, offering a captivating experience for players. Next, you’ll learn how to debug and optimize the project, before finally deploying the game build and integrating it with cloud services such as the Epic Online Services system.By the end of this book, you’ll have the confidence to develop and manage multiplayer experiences using the Unreal Engine environment, taking your newfound programming skills in your upcoming projects.

EJB 3.0 Database Persistence with Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. This book walks you through the practical usage of EJB 3.0 database persistence with Oracle Fusion Middleware. Lots of examples and a step-by-step approach make it a great way for EJB application developers to acquire new skills

Deepak Vohra, Deepak Vohra

EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) 3.0 is a commonly used database persistence technology in Java EE applications. EJB 3.0 has simplified the development of EJBs with an annotations-based API that eliminates the use of remote/local interfaces, home/local home interfaces, and deployment descriptors. A number of other books are available on EJB 3.0, but none covers EJB 3.0 support in Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, which is one of the leaders in the application server market.This is the first book that covers all aspects of EJB 3.0 database persistence development using Oracle Fusion Middleware technology. It covers all the best practices for database persistence ensuring that your applications are easily maintainable. Leaving theory behind, this book uses real-world examples to guide you in building your own EJB 3.0 applications that are well integrated with commonly used Java EE frameworks.The book gets going by discussing the new features in the EJB 3.0 specification. As some readers may still be using EJB 2.0, the book explains how to convert your EJB 2.0 entity beans to EJB 3.0. It then goes on to discuss using EJB 3.0 database persistence with JDeveloper, WebLogic Server, and Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, the main Java EE components of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. The book also covers EJB 3.0 relationships and integrating EJB 3.0 relationships with JSF user interfaces. EJB 3.0 database persistence with some of the commonly used frameworks such as ADF Faces, AJAX, and Web Services is also discussed in the book. It uses the integrated WebLogic Server 11g in some of the chapters and the standalone WebLogic Server in other chapters. While JDeveloper is the primary Java IDE used in the book, one of the chapters is based on the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse.By the time you reach the end of this book, you will be well-versed with developing EJB 3.0 applications using the different Java EE components of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.

Bash Shell Scripting for Pentesters. Master the art of command-line exploitation and enhance your penetration testing workflows

Steve Campbell, David Kennedy

Bash shell scripting is essential for penetration testing because it’s versatile and efficient and integrates thoroughly with the Unix-based systems commonly used in cybersecurity assessments. In this book, the author leverages his decades of experience in IT and pentesting to help you automate repetitive tasks, rapidly analyze data, and craft sophisticated exploits, boosting your effectiveness and productivity.You’ll get to grips with Bash basics, set up a hacking environment, and create basic scripts, before exploring file management, text processing, and manipulation. The chapters will guide you through advanced topics such as networking, parallel processing, and regular expressions. From there, the book will move on to practical applications, walking you through reconnaissance, web application and infrastructure pentesting, privilege escalation, persistence, and pivoting, all using Bash scripting. You’ll also get a solid understanding of advanced topics, including evasion and obfuscation tactics, integrating AI into penetration testing workflows, and implementing DevSecOps practices.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with Bash shell scripting techniques tailored to penetration testing scenarios.

Microsoft Azure Storage Essentials. Harness the power of Microsoft Azure services to build efficient cloud solutions

Chukri A Soueidi

Advanced Blockchain Development. Build highly secure, decentralized applications and conduct secure transactions

Imran Bashir, Narayan Prusty

Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger with applications in industries such as finance, government, and media. This Learning Path is your guide to building blockchain networks using Ethereum, JavaScript, and Solidity. You will get started by understanding the technical foundations of blockchain technology, including distributed systems, cryptography and how this digital ledger keeps data secure. Further into the chapters, you’ll gain insights into developing applications using Ethereum and Hyperledger. As you build on your knowledge of Ether security, mining, smart contracts, and Solidity, you’ll learn how to create robust and secure applications that run exactly as programmed without being affected by fraud, censorship, or third-party interference. Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll explore how blockchain solutions can be implemented in applications such as IoT apps, in addition to its use in currencies. This Learning Path also highlights how you can increase blockchain scalability, and discusses the future scope of this fascinating and powerful technology. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be equipped with the skills you need to tackle pain points encountered in the blockchain life cycle and confidently design and deploy decentralized applications.

Building Apple Watch Projects. Click here to enter text

Stuart Grimshaw

With Apple’s eagerly anticipated entry into the wearable arena, the field is wide open for a new era of app development. The Apple Watch is one of the most important technologies of our time. This easy-to-understand book takes beginners on a delightful journey of discovering the features available to the developer, right up to the completion of medium-level projects ready for App Store submission. It provides the fastest way to develop real-world apps for the Apple Watch by teaching you the concepts of Watch UI, visual haptic and audio, message and data exchange between watch and phone, Web communication, and finally Visual, haptic as well as audio feedback for users.By the end of this book, you will have developed at least four fully functioning apps for deployment on watchOS 2.

Edit without Tears with Final Cut Pro. Elevate your video editing skills with professional workflows and techniques

Bruce G. Macbryde

Edit Without Tears with Final Cut Pro is your essential guide to overcoming challenges in video editing using Final Cut Pro, simplifying complex procedures and workflows and providing a structured approach for efficient and impressive video editing. This book will change how you approach editing, guiding you to create professional-grade videos with ease and confidence.Throughout the book, you'll enhance your efficiency and speed, while also learning unique workflows for common tasks. The comprehensive coverage spans planning video narratives, crafting preliminary edits and refining them, improving audio quality, setting up and editing multicam sequences, leveraging the inspector's controls, and working with both built-in and third-party plugins. You’ll then advance to animating objects using keyframes, utilizing color scopes for advanced color correction, and troubleshooting common issues confidently.By the end of this Final Cut Pro book, you’ll have developed an efficient editing style, unlocking the full power of this video editing software for your creative endeavors.

Hands-On Gradient Boosting with XGBoost and scikit-learn. Perform accessible machine learning and extreme gradient boosting with Python

Corey Wade, Kevin Glynn

XGBoost is an industry-proven, open-source software library that provides a gradient boosting framework for scaling billions of data points quickly and efficiently.The book introduces machine learning and XGBoost in scikit-learn before building up to the theory behind gradient boosting. You’ll cover decision trees and analyze bagging in the machine learning context, learning hyperparameters that extend to XGBoost along the way. You’ll build gradient boosting models from scratch and extend gradient boosting to big data while recognizing speed limitations using timers. Details in XGBoost are explored with a focus on speed enhancements and deriving parameters mathematically. With the help of detailed case studies, you’ll practice building and fine-tuning XGBoost classifiers and regressors using scikit-learn and the original Python API. You'll leverage XGBoost hyperparameters to improve scores, correct missing values, scale imbalanced datasets, and fine-tune alternative base learners. Finally, you'll apply advanced XGBoost techniques like building non-correlated ensembles, stacking models, and preparing models for industry deployment using sparse matrices, customized transformers, and pipelines.By the end of the book, you’ll be able to build high-performing machine learning models using XGBoost with minimal errors and maximum speed.

Flutter Design Patterns and Best Practices. Build scalable, maintainable, and production-ready apps using effective architectural principles

Daria Orlova, Esra Kadah, Jaime Blasco

Flutter’s rapid adoption by developers and businesses alike has led to an increased demand for skilled developers who can deliver high-quality Flutter apps. Flutter can be a great tool to develop apps for yourself, but you don’t always need to consider things like scalability or business goals as a hobbyist. When you build apps for a business, however, you must use specific tools to help the business achieve its goals. This requires solutions to be fast, reliable, and delivered on time. This book will help you meet these business requirements.You'll begin by learning how to build responsive UIs that work on all devices. Next, you'll delve into state management, understanding how to select the appropriate solution and gaining hands-on experience with InheritedWidget, ChangeNotifier, and BLoC. Later, you'll move on to high-level practices such as layered architecture, dependency injection, and repository patterns. The book will also show you how to develop features of any complexity, such as multithreading and native layer implementations. You'll also learn how to ensure the quality of your solutions by prioritizing testing.By the end of this book, you'll be able to deliver well-architected Flutter projects that are stable, scalable, and maintainable.

Next-Level UI Development with PrimeNG. Master the versatile Angular component library to build stunning Angular applications

Dale Nguyen

Elevate your UI development skills with Next-Level UI Development with PrimeNG. In a digital landscape where the user interface plays a pivotal role, PrimeNG expertise is essential for Angular developers. This all-encompassing book shows you how to unleash this powerful UI component library in your Angular projects.From the initial setup to integration, you'll explore the synergy between Angular and PrimeNG and how it can help you enhance your projects. You’ll work with a wide range of UI components and features, such as input controls, data display, manipulation, and navigation, which allow you to build intuitive and dynamic user interfaces. You'll also discover advanced techniques and best practices for theming, performance optimization, creating reusable components, and handling internationalization and localization. With insights into testing and debugging PrimeNG components, this book ensures the development of robust and error-free applications, and finally guides you toward putting your knowledge into practice by building a real-world responsive web application.By the end of this book, you will be able to harness the full potential of PrimeNG, enabling you to create extraordinary web experiences that stand out from the rest.

Data Modeling with Tableau. A practical guide to building data models using Tableau Prep and Tableau Desktop

Kirk Munroe

Tableau is unlike most other BI platforms that have a single data modeling tool and enterprise data model (for example, LookML from Google’s Looker). That doesn’t mean Tableau doesn’t have enterprise data governance; it is both robust and highly flexible. This book will help you effectively use Tableau governance models to build a data-driven organization.Data Modeling with Tableau is an extensive guide, complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and hands-on exercises. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll learn the role that Tableau Prep Builder and Tableau Desktop each play in data modeling. You’ll also explore the components of Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud that make data modeling more robust, secure, and performant. Moreover, by extending data models for Ask and Explain Data, you’ll gain the knowledge required to extend analytics to more people in their organizations, leading to better data-driven decisions. Finally, this book will guide you through the entire Tableau stack and the techniques required to build the right level of governance into Tableau data models for the correct use cases.By the end of this Tableau book, you’ll have a firm understanding of how to leverage data modeling in Tableau to benefit your organization.