Deep Learning Quick Reference. Useful hacks for training and optimizing deep neural networks with TensorFlow and Keras

Mike Bernico

Deep learning has become an essential necessity to enter the world of artificial intelligence. With this book deep learning techniques will become more accessible, practical, and relevant to practicing data scientists. It moves deep learning from academia to the real world through practical examples.You will learn how Tensor Board is used to monitor the training of deep neural networks and solve binary classification problems using deep learning. Readers will then learn to optimize hyperparameters in their deep learning models. The book then takes the readers through the practical implementation of training CNN's, RNN's, and LSTM's with word embeddings and seq2seq models from scratch. Later the book explores advanced topics such as Deep Q Network to solve an autonomous agent problem and how to use two adversarial networks to generate artificial images that appear real. For implementation purposes, we look at popular Python-based deep learning frameworks such as Keras and Tensorflow, Each chapter provides best practices and safe choices to help readers make the right decision while training deep neural networks.By the end of this book, you will be able to solve real-world problems quickly with deep neural networks.

DevOps: Continuous Delivery, Integration, and Deployment with DevOps. Dive into the core DevOps strategies

Sricharan Vadapalli

DevOps is the most widely used software engineering culture and practice that aim sat software development and operation. Continuous integration is a cornerstone technique of DevOps that merges software code updates from developers into a shared central mainline.This book takes a practical approach and covers the tools and strategies of DevOps. It starts with familiarizing you with DevOps framework and then shows how toper form continuous delivery, integration, and deployment with DevOps. You will explore DevOps process maturity frameworks and progression models with checklist templates for each phase of DevOps. You will also be familiar with agile terminology, methodology, and the benefits accrued by an organization by adopting it. You will also get acquainted with popular tools such as Git, Jenkins ,Maven, Gerrit, Nexus, Selenium, and so on.You will learn configuration, automation, and the implementation of infrastructure automation (Infrastructure as Code) with tools such as Chef and Ansible.This book is ideal for engineers, architects, and developers, who wish to learn the core strategies of DevOps.This book is embedded with useful assessments that will help you revise the concepts you have learned in this book. This book is repurposed for this specific learning experience from material from Packt's Hands-on DevOps by Sricharan Vadapalli.

User Experience Mapping. Enhance UX with User Story Map, Journey Map and Diagrams

Peter W. Szabo

Do you want to create better products and innovative solutions? User experience maps will help you understand your users and improve communication with them. Maps can also champion user-centricity within the organization.This book is the first print resource covering two advanced mapping techniques—the behavioral change map and the 4D UX map. You’ll explore user story maps, task models, and journey maps, while also creating wireflows, mental model maps, ecosystem maps, and solution maps. You’ll learn how to use insights from real users to create and improve your maps and products.The book delves into each major user experience map type, ranging from simple techniques based on sticky notes to more complex map types, and guides you in solving real-world problems with maps. You’ll understand how to create maps using a variety of software products, including Adobe Illustrator, Balsamiq Mockups, Axure RP, and Microsoft Word. Besides, you can draw each map type with pen and paper too!The book also showcases communication techniques and workshop ideas. You’ll learn about the Kaizen-UX management framework, developed by the author, now used by many agencies and in-house UX teams in Europe and beyond.Buying this book will give you hundreds of hours worth of user experience knowledge, from one of the world’s leading UX consultants. It will change your users’ world for the better. If you are still not convinced, we have hidden some cat drawings in it, just in case.

Cacti Beginner's Guide. Leverage Cacti to design a robust network operations center - Second Edition

Thomas Urban

Cacti is a performance measurement tool that provides easy methods and functions for gathering and graphing system data. You can use Cacti to develop a robust event management system that can alert on just about anything you would like it to. But to do that, you need to gain a solid understanding of the basics of Cacti, its plugin architecture, and automation concepts.Cacti Beginner's Guide will introduce you to the wide variety of features of Cacti and will guide you on how to use them for maximum effectiveness. Advanced topics such as the plugin architecture and Cacti automation using the command-line interface will help you build a professional performance measurement system. Designed as a beginner's guide, the book starts off with the basics of installing and using Cacti, and also covers the advanced topics that will show you how to customize and extend the core Cacti functionalities. The book offers essential tutorials for creating advanced graphs and using plugins to create enterprise-class reports to show your customers and colleagues. From data templates to input methods and plugin installation to creating your own customized plugins, this book provides you with a rich selection of step-by-step instructions to reach your goals. It covers all you need to know to implement professional performance measurement techniques with Cacti and ways to fully customize Cacti to fit your needs. You will also learn how to migrate Cacti to new servers. Lastly you will also be introduced to the latest feature of building a scalable remote poller environment. By the end of the book, you will be able to implement and extend Cacti to monitor, display, and report the performance of your network exactly the way you want.

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

Jon Hoffman

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

Hands-On GPU-Accelerated Computer Vision with OpenCV and CUDA. Effective techniques for processing complex image data in real time using GPUs

Bhaumik Vaidya

Computer vision has been revolutionizing a wide range of industries, and OpenCV is the most widely chosen tool for computer vision with its ability to work in multiple programming languages. Nowadays, in computer vision, there is a need to process large images in real time, which is difficult to handle for OpenCV on its own. This is where CUDA comes into the picture, allowing OpenCV to leverage powerful NVDIA GPUs. This book provides a detailed overview of integrating OpenCV with CUDA for practical applications. To start with, you’ll understand GPU programming with CUDA, an essential aspect for computer vision developers who have never worked with GPUs. You’ll then move on to exploring OpenCV acceleration with GPUs and CUDA by walking through some practical examples.Once you have got to grips with the core concepts, you’ll familiarize yourself with deploying OpenCV applications on NVIDIA Jetson TX1, which is popular for computer vision and deep learning applications. The last chapters of the book explain PyCUDA, a Python library that leverages the power of CUDA and GPUs for accelerations and can be used by computer vision developers who use OpenCV with Python.By the end of this book, you’ll have enhanced computer vision applications with the help of this book's hands-on approach.

fastText Quick Start Guide. Get started with Facebook's library for text representation and classification

Joydeep Bhattacharjee

Facebook's fastText library handles text representation and classification, used for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Most organizations have to deal with enormous amounts of text data on a daily basis, and gaining efficient data insights requires powerful NLP tools such as fastText. This book is your ideal introduction to fastText. You will learn how to create fastText models from the command line, without the need for complicated code. You will explore the algorithms that fastText is built on and how to use them for word representation and text classification. Next, you will use fastText in conjunction with other popular libraries and frameworks such as Keras, TensorFlow, and PyTorch. Finally, you will deploy fastText models to mobile devices. By the end of this book, you will have all the required knowledge to use fastText in your own applications at work or in projects.

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

Nikhil Malankar

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