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.

OpenStack Sahara Essentials. Integrate, deploy, rapidly configure, and successfully manage your own big data-intensive clusters in the cloud using OpenStack Sahara

Omar Khedher

The Sahara project is a module that aims to simplify the building of data processing capabilities on OpenStack.The goal of this book is to provide a focused, fast paced guide to installing, configuring, and getting started with integrating Hadoop with OpenStack, using Sahara.The book should explain to users how to deploy their data-intensive Hadoop and Spark clusters on top of OpenStack. It will also cover how to use the Sahara REST API, how to develop applications for Elastic Data Processing on Openstack, and setting up hadoop or spark clusters on Openstack.

Forecasting Time Series Data with Facebook Prophet. Build, improve, and optimize time series forecasting models using the advanced forecasting tool

Greg Rafferty

Prophet enables Python and R developers to build scalable time series forecasts. This book will help you to implement Prophet’s cutting-edge forecasting techniques to model future data with higher accuracy and with very few lines of code. You will begin by exploring the evolution of time series forecasting, from the basic early models to the advanced models of the present day. The book will demonstrate how to install and set up Prophet on your machine and build your first model with only a few lines of code. You'll then cover advanced features such as visualizing your forecasts, adding holidays, seasonality, and trend changepoints, handling outliers, and more, along with understanding why and how to modify each of the default parameters. Later chapters will show you how to optimize more complicated models with hyperparameter tuning and by adding additional regressors to the model. Finally, you'll learn how to run diagnostics to evaluate the performance of your models and see some useful features when running Prophet in production environments.By the end of this Prophet book, you will be able to take a raw time series dataset and build advanced and accurate forecast models with concise, understandable, and repeatable code.

CRYENGINE Game Development Blueprints. Perfect the art of creating CRYENGINE games through exciting, hands-on game development projects

Sam Howels, Richard G Marcoux, Riham Mohamed F Aly Aly Toulan, Samuel Howels, ...

Solutions Architect's Handbook. Kick-start your career as a solutions architect by learning architecture design principles and strategies - Second Edition

Saurabh Shrivastava, Neelanjali Srivastav, Rajesh Sheth, Rohan Karmarkar, ...

Becoming a solutions architect requires a hands-on approach, and this edition of the Solutions Architect's Handbook brings exactly that. This handbook will teach you how to create robust, scalable, and fault-tolerant solutions and next-generation architecture designs in a cloud environment. It will also help you build effective product strategies for your business and implement them from start to finish.This new edition features additional chapters on disruptive technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT), quantum computing, data engineering, and machine learning. It also includes updated discussions on cloud-native architecture, blockchain data storage, and mainframe modernization with public cloud.The Solutions Architect's Handbook provides an understanding of solution architecture and how it fits into an agile enterprise environment. It will take you through the journey of solution architecture design by providing detailed knowledge of design pillars, advanced design patterns, anti-patterns, and the cloud-native aspects of modern software design.By the end of this handbook, you'll have learned the techniques needed to create efficient architecture designs that meet your business requirements.