Mastering Blockchain. Distributed ledger technology, decentralization, and smart contracts explained - Second Edition

Imran Bashir

Publisher's Note: This edition from 2018 is outdated and does not cover the latest insights on consensus algorithms, Ethereum 2.0, tokenization, and enterprise blockchains. A new and updated edition of this book that includes all the newest developments and improvements in Blockchain including the above topics is now available.A blockchain is a distributed ledger that is replicated across multiple nodes and enables immutable, transparent and cryptographically secure record-keeping of transactions. The blockchain technology is the backbone of cryptocurrencies, and it has applications in finance, government, media and almost all other industries. Mastering Blockchain, Second Edition has been thoroughly updated and revised to provide a detailed description of this leading technology and its implementation in the real world. This book begins with the technical foundations of blockchain technology, teaching you the fundamentals of distributed systems, cryptography and how it keeps data secure. You will learn about the mechanisms behind cryptocurrencies and how to develop applications using Ethereum, a decentralized virtual machine. You will also explore different other blockchain solutions and get an introduction to business blockchain frameworks under Hyperledger, a collaborative effort for the advancement of blockchain technologies hosted by the Linux Foundation. You will also be shown how to implement blockchain solutions beyond currencies, Internet of Things with blockchain, blockchain scalability, and the future scope of this fascinating and powerful technology.

Blender Quick Start Guide. 3D Modeling, Animation, and Render with Eevee in Blender 2.8

Allan Brito

Blender is open source 3D creation software. With a long history and an enthusiastic community of users, it is the ideal choice for almost any kind of work with 3D modeling or animation. However, for new users, its power and ?exibillity can sometimes be daunting, and that’s when you need this book!The book starts by showing you round the all-new Blender 2.8 user interface. You'll look at the most commonly-used options and tools, such as navigating in 3D and selecting objects. You will then use and manipulate one of the most important windows of the interface, the 3D View.You'll learn how to use essential tools for working with 3D modeling. To give your models the feel of real-world objects, you'll learn how to create materials and set up surfaces. You'll see how to use Physically-Based Rendering (PBR), which allows you to craft realistic surfaces such as wood, stone, and metal. You will also work with Eevee, a new real-time render engine in Blender. You will see how to add motion to objects, making use of Blender's impressive 3D animation features. Finally, you'll learn how to create scenes and organize them for rendering, and later add titles and effects using built-in Blender tools.By the end of the book, you will be able to use Blender 2.8 new UI, Create 3D Models with textures, Animations, and Render them in real-time using Eevee.

Hands-On Data Science with SQL Server 2017. Perform end-to-end data analysis to gain efficient data insight

Marek Chmel, Vladimir Muzny

SQL Server is a relational database management system that enables you to cover end-to-end data science processes using various inbuilt services and features. Hands-On Data Science with SQL Server 2017 starts with an overview of data science with SQL to understand the core tasks in data science. You will learn intermediate-to-advanced level concepts to perform analytical tasks on data using SQL Server. The book has a unique approach, covering best practices, tasks, and challenges to test your abilities at the end of each chapter. You will explore the ins and outs of performing various key tasks such as data collection, cleaning, manipulation, aggregations, and filtering techniques. As you make your way through the chapters, you will turn raw data into actionable insights by wrangling and extracting data from databases using T-SQL. You will get to grips with preparing and presenting data in a meaningful way, using Power BI to reveal hidden patterns. In the concluding chapters, you will work with SQL Server integration services to transform data into a useful format and delve into advanced examples covering machine learning concepts such as predictive analytics using real-world examples.By the end of this book, you will be in a position to handle the growing amounts of data and perform everyday activities that a data science professional performs.

Software Architecture with Spring 5.0. Design and architect highly scalable, robust, and high-performance Java applications

René Enríquez, Alberto Salazar

Spring 5 and its ecosystem can be used to build robust architectures effectively. Software architecture is the underlying piece that helps us accomplish our business goals whilst supporting the features that a product demands. This book explains in detail how to choose the right architecture and apply best practices during your software development cycle to avoid technical debt and support every business requirement. Choosing the right architecture model to support your business requirements is one of the key decisions you need to take when a new product is being created from scratch or is being refactored to support new business demands. This book gives you insights into the most common architectural models and guides you when and where they can be used. During this journey, you’ll see cutting-edge technologies surrounding the Spring products, and understand how to use agile techniques such as DevOps and continuous delivery to take your software to production effectively. By the end of this book, you’ll not only know the ins and outs of Spring, but also be able to make critical design decisions that surpass your clients’ expectations.

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook. Do amazing things with the shell and automate tedious tasks - Third Edition

Clif Flynt, Sarath Lakshman, Shantanu Tushar

The shell is the most powerful tool your computer provides. Despite having it at their fingertips, many users are unaware of how much the shell can accomplish.Using the shell, you can generate databases and web pages from sets of files, automate monotonous admin tasks such as system backups, monitor your system's health and activity, identify network bottlenecks and system resource hogs, and more.This book will show you how to do all this and much more.This book, now in its third edition, describes the exciting new features in the newest Linux distributions to help you accomplish more than you imagine. It shows how to use simple commands to automate complex tasks, automate web interactions, download videos, set up containers and cloud servers, and even get free SSL certificates.Starting with the basics of the shell, you will learn simple commands and how to apply them to real-world issues. From there, you'll learn text processing, web interactions, network and system monitoring, and system tuning.Software engineers will learn how to examine system applications, how to use modern software management tools such as git and fossil for their own work, and how to submit patches to open-source projects.Finally, you'll learn how to set up Linux Containers and Virtual machines and even run your own Cloud server with a free SSL Certificate from letsencrypt.org.

Mastering pfSense. Manage, secure, and monitor your on-premise and cloud network with pfSense 2.4 - Second Edition

David Zientara

pfSense has the same reliability and stability as even the most popular commercial firewall offerings on the market – but, like the very best open-source software, it doesn’t limit you. You’re in control – you can exploit and customize pfSense around your security needs.Mastering pfSense - Second Edition, covers features that have long been part of pfSense such as captive portal, VLANs, traffic shaping, VPNs, load balancing, Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP), multi-WAN, and routing. It also covers features that have been added with the release of 2.4, such as support for ZFS partitions and OpenVPN 2.4. This book takes into account the fact that, in order to support increased cryptographic loads, pfSense version 2.5 will require a CPU that supports AES-NI. The second edition of this book places more of an emphasis on the practical side of utilizing pfSense than the previous edition, and, as a result, more examples are provided which show in step-by-step fashion how to implement many features.

Kibana 7 Quick Start Guide. Visualize your Elasticsearch data with ease

Anurag Srivastava

The Elastic Stack is growing rapidly and, day by day, additional tools are being added to make it more effective. This book endeavors to explain all the important aspects of Kibana, which is essential for utilizing its full potential.This book covers the core concepts of Kibana, with chapters set out in a coherent manner so that readers can advance their learning in a step-by-step manner. The focus is on a practical approach, thereby enabling the reader to apply those examples in real time for a better understanding of the concepts and to provide them with the correct skills in relation to the tool. With its succinct explanations, it is quite easy for a reader to use this book as a reference guide for learning basic to advanced implementations of Kibana. The practical examples, such as the creation of Kibana dashboards from CSV data, application RDBMS data, system metrics data, log file data, APM agents, and search results, can provide readers with a number of different drop-off points from where they can fetch any type of data into Kibana for the purpose of analysis or dashboarding.

Python Machine Learning By Example. The easiest way to get into machine learning

Yuxi (Hayden) Liu

Data science and machine learning are some of the top buzzwords in the technical world today. A resurging interest in machine learning is due to the same factors that have made data mining and Bayesian analysis more popular than ever. This book is your entry point to machine learning. This book starts with an introduction to machine learning and the Python language and shows you how to complete the setup. Moving ahead, you will learn all the important concepts such as, exploratory data analysis, data preprocessing, feature extraction, data visualization and clustering, classification, regression and model performance evaluation. With the help of various projects included, you will find it intriguing to acquire the mechanics of several important machine learning algorithms – they are no more obscure as they thought. Also, you will be guided step by step to build your own models from scratch. Toward the end, you will gather a broad picture of the machine learning ecosystem and best practices of applying machine learning techniques. Through this book, you will learn to tackle data-driven problems and implement your solutions with the powerful yet simple language, Python. Interesting and easy-to-follow examples, to name some, news topic classification, spam email detection, online ad click-through prediction, stock prices forecast, will keep you glued till you reach your goal.