Data Visualization: a successful design process

Andy Kirk, Andy Kirk

Do you want to create more attractive charts? Or do you have huge data sets and need to unearth the key insights in a visual manner? Data visualization is the representation and presentation of data, using proven design techniques to bring alive the patterns, stories and key insights locked away.Data Visualization: a Successful Design Process explores the unique fusion of art and science that is data visualization; a discipline for which instinct alone is insufficient for you to succeed in enabling audiences to discover key trends, insights and discoveries from your data. This book will equip you with the key techniques required to overcome contemporary data visualization challenges. You'll discover a proven design methodology that helps you develop invaluable knowledge and practical capabilities.You'll never again settle for a default Excel chart or resort to fancy-looking graphs. You will be able to work from the starting point of acquiring, preparing and familiarizing with your data, right through to concept design. Choose your killer visual representation to engage and inform your audience.Data Visualization: a Successful Design Process will inspire you to relish any visualization project with greater confidence and bullish know-how; turning challenges into exciting design opportunities.

vBulletin: A Users Guide. Configure, manage and maintain your own vBulletin discussion forum

Kathy Kingsley-Hughes, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Ashley Busby

Written specifically to allow you to create a discussion forum, vBulletin, provides all of the tools, features and functionality for you to set up and develop a vibrant community. Because it specializes in this one aspect of your website, all the features are geared towards this goal, and you can leave the improvement and additions to the vBulletin developers while you get on with managing the rest of your website. If you are either already running a community forum based on vBulletin, or are planning on establishing one, then this is the book for you. This book will guide you through installing, configuring, managing and maintaining a vBulletin discussion forum on your own website. The book begins with the initial installation and configuration of vBulletin on your system. You will then go on a tour of vBulletin and its features, for both users and administrators. This will grow your understanding and familiarise you with the power and possibilities of vBulletin. vBulletin's Administration Control Panel is where you can control every aspect of your board. From users, forums and word filters to skins, templates and maintenance, everything can be done through the web-based control panel. The book devotes significant sections to covering these, getting you up to speed on the options available to you, and offering advice to help you make the right choices with your board administration. To make your forums stand out from the rest, we cover skins and templates to take your first steps in customising your forum. vBulletin is one of the most popular forum platforms available. Well known for its power and speed, it drives many of the most popular discussion forums on the Internet.

Essential Mathematics for Quantum Computing. A beginner's guide to just the math you need without needless complexities

Leonard S. Woody III

Quantum computing is an exciting subject that offers hope to solve the world’s most complex problems at a quicker pace. It is being used quite widely in different spheres of technology, including cybersecurity, finance, and many more, but its concepts, such as superposition, are often misunderstood because engineers may not know the math to understand them. This book will teach the requisite math concepts in an intuitive way and connect them to principles in quantum computing.Starting with the most basic of concepts, 2D vectors that are just line segments in space, you'll move on to tackle matrix multiplication using an instinctive method. Linearity is the major theme throughout the book and since quantum mechanics is a linear theory, you'll see how they go hand in hand. As you advance, you'll understand intrinsically what a vector is and how to transform vectors with matrices and operators. You'll also see how complex numbers make their voices heard and understand the probability behind it all.It’s all here, in writing you can understand. This is not a stuffy math book with definitions, axioms, theorems, and so on. This book meets you where you’re at and guides you to where you need to be for quantum computing. Already know some of this stuff? No problem! The book is componentized, so you can learn just the parts you want. And with tons of exercises and their answers, you'll get all the practice you need.

Configuring Windows Server Hybrid Advanced Services Exam Ref AZ-801. Configure advanced Windows Server services for on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments

Chris Gill, Shannon Kuehn

Configuring Windows Server Hybrid Advanced Services Exam Ref AZ-801 helps you master various cloud and data center management concepts in detail, helping you grow your expertise in configuring and managing Windows Server in on-premises, hybrid, and cloud-based workloads. Throughout the book, you'll cover all the topics needed to pass the AZ-801 exam and use the skills you acquire to advance in your career.With this book, you’ll learn how to secure your on-premises Windows Server resources and Azure IaaS workloads. First, you’ll explore the potential vulnerabilities of your resources and learn how to fix or mitigate them. Next, you'll implement high availability Windows Server virtual machine workloads with Hyper-V Replica, Windows Server Failover Clustering, and Windows File Server.You’ll implement disaster recovery and server migration of Windows Server in on-premises and hybrid environments. You’ll also learn how to monitor and troubleshoot Windows Server environments.By the end of this book, you'll have gained the knowledge and skills required to ace the AZ-801 exam, and you'll have a handy, on-the-job desktop reference guide.

Building AI Applications with Microsoft Semantic Kernel. Easily integrate generative AI capabilities and copilot experiences into your applications

Lucas A. Meyer

In the fast-paced world of AI, developers are constantly seeking efficient ways to integrate AI capabilities into their apps. Microsoft Semantic Kernel simplifies this process by using the GenAI features from Microsoft and OpenAI.Written by Lucas A. Meyer, a Principal Research Scientist in Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, this book helps you get hands on with Semantic Kernel. It begins by introducing you to different generative AI services such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, demonstrating their integration with Semantic Kernel. You’ll then learn to craft prompt templates for reuse across various AI services and variables. Next, you’ll learn how to add functionality to Semantic Kernel by creating your own plugins. The second part of the book shows you how to combine multiple plugins to execute complex actions, and how to let Semantic Kernel use its own AI to solve complex problems by calling plugins, including the ones made by you. The book concludes by teaching you how to use vector databases to expand the memory of your AI services and how to help AI remember the context of earlier requests. You’ll also be guided through several real-world examples of applications, such as RAG and custom GPT agents.By the end of this book, you'll have gained the knowledge you need to start using Semantic Kernel to add AI capabilities to your applications.

Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies. Learn to mitigate exploits, malware, phishing, and other social engineering attacks

Tim Rains

After scrutinizing numerous cybersecurity strategies, Microsoft’s former Global Chief Security Advisor in this book helps you understand the efficacy of popular cybersecurity strategies and more.Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies offers an unprecedented long-term view of the global threat landscape by examining the twenty-year trend in vulnerability disclosures and exploitation, nearly a decade of regional differences in malware infections, the socio-economic factors that underpin them, and how global malware has evolved. This will give you further perspectives into malware protection for your organization. It also examines internet-based threats that CISOs should be aware of.The book will provide you with an evaluation of the various cybersecurity strategies that have ultimately failed over the past twenty years, along with one or two that have actually worked. It will help executives and security and compliance professionals understand how cloud computing is a game changer for them.By the end of this book, you will know how to measure the effectiveness of your organization’s cybersecurity strategy and the efficacy of the vendors you employ to help you protect your organization and yourself.

Mastering Data Mining with Python - Find patterns hidden in your data. Find patterns hidden in your data

Megan Squire

Data mining is an integral part of the data science pipeline. It is the foundation of any successful data-driven strategy – without it, you'll never be able to uncover truly transformative insights. Since data is vital to just about every modern organization, it is worth taking the next step to unlock even greater value and more meaningful understanding.If you already know the fundamentals of data mining with Python, you are now ready to experiment with more interesting, advanced data analytics techniques using Python's easy-to-use interface and extensive range of libraries. In this book, you'll go deeper into many often overlooked areas of data mining, including association rule mining, entity matching, network mining, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, text summarization, topic modeling, and anomaly detection. For each data mining technique, we'll review the state-of-the-art and current best practices before comparing a wide variety of strategies for solving each problem. We will then implement example solutions using real-world data from the domain of software engineering, and we will spend time learning how to understand and interpret the results we get.By the end of this book, you will have solid experience implementing some of the most interesting and relevant data mining techniques available today, and you will have achieved a greater fluency in the important field of Python data analytics.

OpenCV 4 with Python Blueprints. Build creative computer vision projects with the latest version of OpenCV 4 and Python 3 - Second Edition

Dr. Menua Gevorgyan, Arsen Mamikonyan, Michael Beyeler

OpenCV is a native cross-platform C++ library for computer vision, machine learning, and image processing. It is increasingly being adopted in Python for development. This book will get you hands-on with a wide range of intermediate to advanced projects using the latest version of the framework and language, OpenCV 4 and Python 3.8, instead of only covering the core concepts of OpenCV in theoretical lessons. This updated second edition will guide you through working on independent hands-on projects that focus on essential OpenCV concepts such as image processing, object detection, image manipulation, object tracking, and 3D scene reconstruction, in addition to statistical learning and neural networks.You’ll begin with concepts such as image filters, Kinect depth sensor, and feature matching. As you advance, you’ll not only get hands-on with reconstructing and visualizing a scene in 3D but also learn to track visually salient objects. The book will help you further build on your skills by demonstrating how to recognize traffic signs and emotions on faces. Later, you’ll understand how to align images, and detect and track objects using neural networks.By the end of this OpenCV Python book, you’ll have gained hands-on experience and become proficient at developing advanced computer vision apps according to specific business needs.