Data Engineering with Google Cloud Platform. A practical guide to operationalizing scalable data analytics systems on GCP

Adi Wijaya

With this book, you'll understand how the highly scalable Google Cloud Platform (GCP) enables data engineers to create end-to-end data pipelines right from storing and processing data and workflow orchestration to presenting data through visualization dashboards.Starting with a quick overview of the fundamental concepts of data engineering, you'll learn the various responsibilities of a data engineer and how GCP plays a vital role in fulfilling those responsibilities. As you progress through the chapters, you'll be able to leverage GCP products to build a sample data warehouse using Cloud Storage and BigQuery and a data lake using Dataproc. The book gradually takes you through operations such as data ingestion, data cleansing, transformation, and integrating data with other sources. You'll learn how to design IAM for data governance, deploy ML pipelines with the Vertex AI, leverage pre-built GCP models as a service, and visualize data with Google Data Studio to build compelling reports. Finally, you'll find tips on how to boost your career as a data engineer, take the Professional Data Engineer certification exam, and get ready to become an expert in data engineering with GCP.By the end of this data engineering book, you'll have developed the skills to perform core data engineering tasks and build efficient ETL data pipelines with GCP.

Mastering Parallel Programming with R. Master the robust features of R parallel programming to accelerate your data science computations

Simon R. Chapple, Terence Sloan, Thorsten Forster, Eilidh Troup

R is one of the most popular programming languages used in data science. Applying R to big data and complex analytic tasks requires the harnessing of scalable compute resources.Mastering Parallel Programming with R presents a comprehensive and practical treatise on how to build highly scalable and efficient algorithms in R. It will teach you a variety of parallelization techniques, from simple use of R’s built-in parallel package versions of lapply(), to high-level AWS cloud-based Hadoop and Apache Spark frameworks. It will also teach you low level scalable parallel programming using RMPI and pbdMPI for message passing, applicable to clusters and supercomputers, and how to exploit thousand-fold simple processor GPUs through ROpenCL. By the end of the book, you will understand the factors that influence parallel efficiency, including assessing code performance and implementing load balancing; pitfalls to avoid, including deadlock and numerical instability issues; how to structure your code and data for the most appropriate type of parallelism for your problem domain; and how to extract the maximum performance from your R code running on a variety of computer systems.

Selenium Essentials. Get to grips with automated web testing with the amazing power of Selenium WebDriver

Prashanth Sams

Software Architecture with C# 10 and .NET 6. Develop software solutions using microservices, DevOps, EF Core, and design patterns for Azure - Third Edition

Gabriel Baptista, Francesco Abbruzzese

Software architecture is the practice of implementing structures and systems that streamline the software development process and improve the quality of an app. This fully revised and expanded third edition, featuring the latest features of .NET 6 and C# 10, enables you to acquire the key skills, knowledge, and best practices required to become an effective software architect.Software Architecture with C# 10 and .NET 6, Third Edition features new chapters that describe the importance of the software architect, microservices with ASP.NET Core, and analyzing the architectural aspects of the front-end in the applications, including the new approach of .NET MAUI. It also includes a new chapter focused on providing a short introduction to artificial intelligence and machine learning using ML.NET, and updated chapters on Azure Kubernetes Service, EF Core, and Blazor.You will begin by understanding how to transform user requirements into architectural needs and exploring the differences between functional and non-functional requirements. Next, you will explore how to choose a cloud solution for your infrastructure, taking into account the factors that will help you manage a cloud-based app successfully. Finally, you will analyze and implement software design patterns that will allow you to solve common development problems.By the end of this book, you will be able to build and deliver highly scalable enterprise-ready apps that meet your business requirements.

XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide - Visual Basic Edition. Create your own exciting games with Visual Basic and Microsoft XNA 4.0

Kurt Jaegers

XNA Game Studio enables hobbyists and independent game developers to easily create video games, and now gives that power to Visual Basic developers. XNA lets you bring your creations to life on Windows, the Xbox 360 and the Windows Phone platforms. The latest release of XNA has added support to Visual Basic and therefore, Visual Basic developers now have the power to give life to their creativity with XNA.This book covers both the concepts and the implementations necessary to get you started on bringing your own creations to life with XNA. It presents four different games, including a puzzler, space shooter, multi-axis shoot 'em up, and a jump-and-run platformer. Each game introduces new concepts and techniques to build a solid foundation for your own ideas and creativity.This book details the creation of four games, all in different styles, from start to finish using Visual Basic and the Microsoft XNA framework. Beginning with the basics of drawing images to the screen, the book then incrementally introduces sprite animation, particles, sound effects, tile-based maps, and path finding. It then explores combining XNA with Windows Forms to build an interactive map editor, and builds a platform-style game using the editor-generated maps. Finally, the book covers the considerations necessary for deploying your games to the Xbox 360 platform.By the end of the book, you will have a solid foundation of game development concepts and techniques as well as working sample games to extend and innovate upon. You will have the knowledge necessary to create games that you can complete without an army of fellow game developers at your back.

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On. Apply modern RL methods to practical problems of chatbots, robotics, discrete optimization, web automation, and more - Second Edition

Maxim Lapan

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On, Second Edition is an updated and expanded version of the bestselling guide to the very latest reinforcement learning (RL) tools and techniques. It provides you with an introduction to the fundamentals of RL, along with the hands-on ability to code intelligent learning agents to perform a range of practical tasks.With six new chapters devoted to a variety of up-to-the-minute developments in RL, including discrete optimization (solving the Rubik's Cube), multi-agent methods, Microsoft's TextWorld environment, advanced exploration techniques, and more, you will come away from this book with a deep understanding of the latest innovations in this emerging field.In addition, you will gain actionable insights into such topic areas as deep Q-networks, policy gradient methods, continuous control problems, and highly scalable, non-gradient methods. You will also discover how to build a real hardware robot trained with RL for less than $100 and solve the Pong environment in just 30 minutes of training using step-by-step code optimization.In short, Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On, Second Edition, is your companion to navigating the exciting complexities of RL as it helps you attain experience and knowledge through real-world examples.

Learning R Programming. Language, tools, and practical techniques

Kun Ren

R is a high-level functional language and one of the must-know tools for data science and statistics. Powerful but complex, R can be challenging for beginners and those unfamiliar with its unique behaviors. Learning R Programming is the solution - an easy and practical way to learn R and develop a broad and consistent understanding of the language. Through hands-on examples you'll discover powerful R tools, and R best practices that will give you a deeper understanding of working with data. You'll get to grips with R's data structures and data processing techniques, as well as the most popular R packages to boost your productivity from the offset.Start with the basics of R, then dive deep into the programming techniques and paradigms to make your R code excel. Advance quickly to a deeper understanding of R's behavior as you learn common tasks including data analysis, databases, web scraping, high performance computing, and writing documents. By the end of the book, you'll be a confident R programmer adept at solving problems with the right techniques.

CentOS 7 Server Deployment Cookbook

Timothy Boronczyk

CentOS is derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) sources and is widely used as a Linux server. This book will help you to better configure and manage Linux servers in varying scenarios and business requirements. Starting with installing CentOS, this book will walk you through the networking aspects of CentOS. You will then learn how to manage users and their permissions, software installs, disks, filesystems, and so on. You’ll then see how to secure connection to remotely access a desktop and work with databases. Toward the end, you will find out how to manage DNS, e-mails, web servers, and more. You will also learn to detect threats by monitoring network intrusion. Finally, the book will cover virtualization techniques that will help you make the most of CentOS.