Mastering UI Development with Unity. An in-depth guide to developing engaging user interfaces with Unity 5, Unity 2017, and Unity 2018

Ashley Godbold

A functional UI is an important component for player interaction in every type of video game. Along with imparting crucial statistical information to the player, the UI is also the window through which the player engages with the world established by the game. Unity's tools give you the opportunity to create complex and attractive UIs to make your game stand out.This book helps you realize the full potential of Unity's powerful tools to create the best UI for your games by walking you through the creation of myriad user interface components.Learn how to create visually engaging heads-up-displays, pause menus, health bars, circular progress bars, animated menus, and more. This book not only teaches how to lay out visual elements, but also how to program these features and implement them across multiple games of varying genres.While working through the examples provided, you will learn how to develop a UI that scales to multiple screen resolutions, so your game can be released on multiple platforms with minimal changes.

Windows Presentation Foundation Development Cookbook. 100 recipes to build rich desktop client applications on Windows

Kunal Chowdhury

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is Microsoft's development tool for building rich Windows client user experiences that incorporate UIs, media, and documents. With the updates in .NET 4.7, Visual Studio 2017, C# 7, and .NET Standard 2.0, WPF has taken giant strides and is now easier than ever for developers to use. If you want to get an in-depth view of WPF mechanics and capabilities, then this book is for you.The book begins by teaching you about the fundamentals of WPF and then quickly shows you the standard controls and the layout options. It teaches you about data bindings and how to utilize resources and the MVVM pattern to maintain a clean and reusable structure in your code. After this, you will explore the animation capabilities of WPF and see how they integrate with other mechanisms. Towards the end of the book, you will learn about WCF services and explore WPF's support for debugging and asynchronous operations.By the end of the book, you will have a deep understanding of WPF and will know how to build resilient applications.

Effective Business Intelligence with QuickSight. Boost your business IQ with Amazon QuickSight

Rajesh Nadipalli

Amazon QuickSight is the next-generation Business Intelligence (BI) cloud service that can help you build interactive visualizations on top of various data sources hosted on Amazon Cloud Infrastructure. QuickSight delivers responsive insights into big data and enables organizations to quickly democratize data visualizations and scale to hundreds of users at a fraction of the cost when compared to traditional BI tools.This book begins with an introduction to Amazon QuickSight, feature differentiators from traditional BI tools, and how it fits in the overall AWS big data ecosystem. With practical examples, you will find tips and techniques to load your data to AWS, prepare it, and finally visualize it using QuickSight. You will learn how to build interactive charts, reports, dashboards, and stories using QuickSight and share with others using just your browser and mobile app.The book also provides a blueprint to build a real-life big data project on top of AWS Data Lake Solution and demonstrates how to build a modern data lake on the cloud with governance, data catalog, and analysis. It reviews the current product shortcomings, features in the roadmap, and how to provide feedback to AWS.Grow your profits, improve your products, and beat your competitors.

CompTIA Project+ Certification Guide. Learn project management best practices and successfully pass the CompTIA Project+ PK0-004 exam

J. Ashley Hunt

The CompTIA Project+ exam is designed for IT professionals who want to improve their career trajectory by gaining certification in project management specific to their industry. This guide covers everything necessary to pass the current iteration of the Project+ PK0-004 exam.The CompTIA Project+ Certification Guide starts by covering project initiation best practices, including an understanding of organizational structures, team roles, and responsibilities. You’ll then study best practices for developing a project charter and the scope of work to produce deliverables necessary to obtain formal approval of the end result. The ability to monitor your project work and make changes as necessary to bring performance back in line with the plan is the difference between a successful and unsuccessful project. The concluding chapters of the book provide best practices to help keep an eye on your projects and close them out successfully. The guide also includes practice questions created to mirror the exam experience and help solidify your understanding of core project management concepts.By the end of this book, you will be able to develop creative solutions for complex issues faced in project management.

Hands-On Red Team Tactics. A practical guide to mastering Red Team operations

Himanshu Sharma, Harpreet Singh

Red Teaming is used to enhance security by performing simulated attacks on an organization in order to detect network and system vulnerabilities. Hands-On Red Team Tactics starts with an overview of pentesting and Red Teaming, before giving you an introduction to few of the latest pentesting tools. We will then move on to exploring Metasploit and getting to grips with Armitage. Once you have studied the fundamentals, you will learn how to use Cobalt Strike and how to set up its team server.The book introduces some common lesser known techniques for pivoting and how to pivot over SSH, before using Cobalt Strike to pivot. This comprehensive guide demonstrates advanced methods of post-exploitation using Cobalt Strike and introduces you to Command and Control (C2) servers and redirectors. All this will help you achieve persistence using beacons and data exfiltration, and will also give you the chance to run through the methodology to use Red Team activity tools such as Empire during a Red Team activity on Active Directory and Domain Controller.In addition to this, you will explore maintaining persistent access, staying untraceable, and getting reverse connections over different C2 covert channels.By the end of this book, you will have learned about advanced penetration testing tools, techniques to get reverse shells over encrypted channels, and processes for post-exploitation.

Learn Blockchain Programming with JavaScript. Build your very own Blockchain and decentralized network with JavaScript and Node.js

Eric Traub

Learn Blockchain Programming with JavaScript begins by giving you a clear understanding of what blockchain technology is. You’ll then set up an environment to build your very own blockchain and you’ll add various functionalities to it. By adding functionalities to your blockchain such as the ability to mine new blocks, create transactions, and secure your blockchain through a proof-of-work you’ll gain an in-depth understanding of how blockchain technology functions.As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll learn how to build an API server to interact with your blockchain and how to host your blockchain on a decentralized network. You’ll also build a consensus algorithm and use it to verify data and keep the entire blockchain network synchronized. In the concluding chapters, you’ll finish building your blockchain prototype and gain a thorough understanding of why blockchain technology is so secure and valuable. By the end of this book, you'll understand how decentralized blockchain networks function and why decentralization is such an important feature for securing a blockchain.

Implementing Oracle API Platform Cloud Service. Design, deploy, and manage your APIs in Oracle’s new API Platform

Andrew Bell, Sander Rensen, Luis Weir, Phil Wilkins

Implementing Oracle API Platform Cloud Service moves from theory to practice using the newest Oracle API management platform. This critical new platform for Oracle developers allows you to interface the complex array of services your clients expect in the modern world.First, you'll learn about Oracle’s new platform and get an overview of it, then you'll see a use case showing the functionality and use of this new platform for Oracle customers. Next, you’ll see the power of Apiary and begin designing your own APIs. From there, you’ll build and run microservices and set up the Oracle API gateways. Moving on, you’ll discover how to customize the developer portal and publish your own APIs. You’ll spend time looking at configuration management on the new platform, and implementing the Oauth 2.0 policy, as well as custom policies. The latest finance modules from Oracle will be examined, with some of the third party alternatives in sight as well.This broad-scoped book completes your journey with a clear examination of how to transition APIs from Oracle API Management 12c to the new Oracle API Platform, so that you can step into the future confidently.

Hybrid Mobile Development with Ionic. Building highly interactive mobile apps

Gaurav Saini

Ionic is an open source, front-end framework that allows you to develop hybrid mobile apps without any native-language hassle for each platform. It offers a library of mobile-optimized HTML, CSS, and JS components for building highly interactive mobile apps.This book will help you to develop a complete, professional and quality mobile application with Ionic Framework. You will start the journey by learning to configure, customize, and migrate Ionic 1x to 3x. Then, you will move on to Ionic 3 components and see how you can customize them according to your applications. You will also implement various native plugins and integrate them with Ionic and Ionic Cloud services to use them optimally in your application. By this time, you will be able to create a full-fledged e-commerce application. Next, you will master authorization, authentication, and security techniques in Ionic 3 to ensure that your application and data are secure. Further, you will integrate the backend services such as Firebase and the Cordova iBeacon plugin in your application. Lastly, you will be looking into Progressive Web Applications and its support with Ionic, with a demonstration of an offline-first application.By the end of the book, you will not only have built a professional, hybrid mobile application, but will also have ensured that your app is secure and performance driven.