Blockchain for Business 2019. A user-friendly introduction to blockchain technology and its business applications

Peter Lipovyanov

Blockchain for Business 2019 is a comprehensive guide that enables you to bring in various blockchain functionalities to extend your existing business models and make correct fully-informed decisions. You will learn how decentralized applications are transforming numerous business sectors that are expected to play a huge role in the future. You will see how large corporations are already implementing blockchain technology now. You will then learn about the various blockchain services, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger, and others to understand their use cases in a variety of business domains. You will develop a solid fundamental understanding of blockchain architecture. Moving ahead, you will get to grips with the inner workings of blockchain, with detailed explanations of mining, decentralized consensus, cryptography, smart contracts, and many other important concepts. You will delve into a realistic view of the current state of blockchain technology, along with its issues, limitations, and potential solutions that can take it to the next level.By the end of this book, you will all be well versed in the latest innovations and developments in the emerging blockchain space.

Hands-On Cybersecurity for Finance. Identify vulnerabilities and secure your financial services from security breaches

Dr. Erdal Ozkaya, Milad Aslaner

Organizations have always been a target of cybercrime. Hands-On Cybersecurity for Finance teaches you how to successfully defend your system against common cyber threats, making sure your financial services are a step ahead in terms of security.The book begins by providing an overall description of cybersecurity, guiding you through some of the most important services and technologies currently at risk from cyber threats. Once you have familiarized yourself with the topic, you will explore specific technologies and threats based on case studies and real-life scenarios. As you progress through the chapters, you will discover vulnerabilities and bugs (including the human risk factor), gaining an expert-level view of the most recent threats. You'll then explore information on how you can achieve data and infrastructure protection. In the concluding chapters, you will cover recent and significant updates to procedures and configurations, accompanied by important details related to cybersecurity research and development in IT-based financial services.By the end of the book, you will have gained a basic understanding of the future of information security and will be able to protect financial services and their related infrastructures.

Android Development with Kotlin. Enhance your skills for Android development using Kotlin

Igor Wojda, Marcin Moskala

Nowadays, improved application development does not just mean building better performing applications. It has become crucial to find improved ways of writing code. Kotlin is a language that helps developers build amazing Android applications easily and effectively. This book discusses Kotlin features in context of Android development. It demonstrates how common examples that are typical for Android development, can be simplified using Kotlin. It also shows all the benefits, improvements and new possibilities provided by this language.The book is divided in three modules that show the power of Kotlin and teach you how to use it properly. Each module present features in different levels of advancement. The first module covers Kotlin basics. This module will lay a firm foundation for the rest of the chapters so you are able to read and understand most of the Kotlin code. The next module dives deeper into the building blocks of Kotlin, such as functions, classes, and function types. You will learn how Kotlin brings many improvements to the table by improving common Java concepts and decreasing code verbosity. The last module presents features that are not present in Java. You will learn how certain tasks can be achieved in simpler ways thanks to Kotlin.Through the book, you will learn how to use Kotlin for Android development. You will get to know and understand most important Kotlin features, and how they can be used. You will be ready to start your own adventure with Android development with Kotlin.

Security Automation with Ansible 2. Leverage Ansible 2 to automate complex security tasks like application security, network security, and malware analysis

Akash Mahajan, MADHU AKULA

Security automation is one of the most interesting skills to have nowadays. Ansible allows you to write automation procedures once and use them across your entire infrastructure. This book will teach you the best way to use Ansible for seemingly complex tasks by using the various building blocks available and creating solutions that are easy to teach others, store for later, perform version control on, and repeat.We’ll start by covering various popular modules and writing simple playbooks to showcase those modules. You’ll see how this can be applied over a variety of platforms and operating systems, whether they are Windows/Linux bare metal servers or containers on a cloud platform. Once the bare bones automation is in place, you’ll learn how to leverage tools such as Ansible Tower or even Jenkins to create scheduled repeatable processes around security patching, security hardening, compliance reports, monitoring of systems, and so on. Moving on, you’ll delve into useful security automation techniques and approaches, and learn how to extend Ansible for enhanced security. While on the way, we will tackle topics like how to manage secrets, how to manage all the playbooks that we will create and how to enable collaboration using Ansible Galaxy. In the final stretch, we’ll tackle how to extend the modules of Ansible for our use, and do all the previous tasks in a programmatic manner to get even more powerful automation frameworks and rigs.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 PowerShell Cookbook. Powerful recipes to automate time-consuming administrative tasks - Fourth Edition

Jonas Andersson, Nuno Mota, Mike Pfeiffer

We start with a set of recipes on core PowerShell concepts. This will provide you with a foundation for the examples in the book. Next, you'll see how to implement some of the common exchange management shell tasks, so you can effectively write scripts with this latest release. You will then learn to manage Exchange recipients, automate recipient-related tasks in your environment, manage mailboxes, and understand distribution group management within the Exchange Management Shell. Moving on, we'll work through several scenarios where PowerShell scripting can be used to increase your efficiency when managing databases, which are the most critical resources in your Exchange environment. Towards the end, you'll discover how to achieve Exchange High Availability and how to secure your environment, monitor the health of Exchange, and integrate Exchange with Office Online Server, Skype for Business Server, and Exchange Online (Office 365).By the end of the book, you will be able to perform administrative tasks efficiently.

Building Serverless Architectures. Unleash the power of AWS Lambdas for your applications

Cagatay Gurturk

Over the past years, all kind of companies from start-ups to giant enterprises started their move to public cloud providers in order to save their costs and reduce the operation effort needed to keep their shops open. Now it is even possible to craft a complex software system consisting of many independent micro-functions that will run only when they are needed without needing to maintain individual servers.The focus of this book is to design serverless architectures, and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, along with decision factors to consider. You will learn how to design a serverless application, get to know that key points of services that serverless applications are based on, and known issues and solutions.The book addresses key challenges such as how to slice out the core functionality of the software to be distributed in different cloud services and cloud functions. It covers basic and advanced usage of these services, testing and securing the serverless software, automating deployment, and more.By the end of the book, you will be equipped with knowledge of new tools and techniques to keep up with this evolution in the IT industry.

Hands-On Chatbots and Conversational UI Development. Build chatbots and voice user interfaces with Chatfuel, Dialogflow, Microsoft Bot Framework, Twilio, and Alexa Skills

Srini Janarthanam

Conversation as an interface is the best way for machines to interact with us using the universally accepted human tool that is language. Chatbots and voice user interfaces are two flavors of conversational UIs. Chatbots are real-time, data-driven answer engines that talk in natural language and are context-aware. Voice user interfaces are driven by voice and can understand and respond to users using speech. This book covers both types of conversational UIs by leveraging APIs from multiple platforms. We'll take a project-based approach to understand how these UIs are built and the best use cases for deploying them. We'll start by building a simple messaging bot from the Facebook Messenger API to understand the basics of bot building. Then we move on to creating a Task model that can perform complex tasks such as ordering and planning events with the newly-acquired-by-Google Dialogflow and Microsoft Bot framework. We then turn to voice-enabled UIs that are capable of interacting with users using speech with Amazon Alexa and Google Home. By the end of the book, you will have created your own line of chatbots and voice UIs for multiple leading platforms.

TensorFlow Machine Learning Projects. Build 13 real-world projects with advanced numerical computations using the Python ecosystem

Ankit Jain, Armando Fandango, Amita Kapoor

TensorFlow has transformed the way machine learning is perceived. TensorFlow Machine Learning Projects teaches you how to exploit the benefits—simplicity, efficiency, and flexibility—of using TensorFlow in various real-world projects. With the help of this book, you’ll not only learn how to build advanced projects using different datasets but also be able to tackle common challenges using a range of libraries from the TensorFlow ecosystem.To start with, you’ll get to grips with using TensorFlow for machine learning projects; you’ll explore a wide range of projects using TensorForest and TensorBoard for detecting exoplanets, TensorFlow.js for sentiment analysis, and TensorFlow Lite for digit classification.As you make your way through the book, you’ll build projects in various real-world domains, incorporating natural language processing (NLP), the Gaussian process, autoencoders, recommender systems, and Bayesian neural networks, along with trending areas such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), capsule networks, and reinforcement learning. You’ll learn how to use the TensorFlow on Spark API and GPU-accelerated computing with TensorFlow to detect objects, followed by how to train and develop a recurrent neural network (RNN) model to generate book scripts.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the required expertise to build full-fledged machine learning projects at work.