Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook. If you're already au fait with Blender, this book gives extra power to your artist's elbow with a fantastic grounding in Cycles. Packed with tips and recipes, it makes light work of the toughest concepts. - Second Edition

Bernardo Iraci, Ton Roosendaal

Blender provides a broad spectrum of modeling, texturing, lighting, animation and video post-processing functionality in one package. It provides cross-platform interoperability, extensibility and a tightly integrated workflow. Blender is one of the most popular Open Source 3D graphics applications in the world.Modern GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) have some limitations for rendering complex scenes. This is mainly because of limited memory, and interactivity issues when the same graphics card is also used for displaying and rendering frames. This is where Cycles rendering engine comes into play. Cycles is bundled as an add-on with Blender. Some of the features of Cycles is its quality, speed and having integrated industry standard libraries.This book will show you how to carry out your first steps in Cycles - a brand new rendering engine for Blender. In a gradual and logical way, you will learn how to create complex shaders and lighting setups to face any kind of situation that you may find in Computer Graphics.This book provides information on how to setup your first application in Cycles. You will start by adding lights, materials, and textures to your scene. When it's time for the final render, you will see how to setup Cycles in the best way. You will learn about a wide variety of materials, lighting, techniques, tips, and tricks to get the best out of Cycles. Further on in the book, you will get to know about animation and still shots, and learn how to create advanced materials for realistic rendering, as well cartoon style shaders.This cookbook contains a wide range of different scenes, proposed in a structured and progressive order. During this journey, you will get involved in the concepts behind every step you take in order to really master what you learn.

VMware Horizon View 6 Desktop Virtualization Cookbook. Over 100 hands-on recipes demonstrating the core as well as latest features of your VMware Horizon View infrastructure

Jason Ventresco

Accelerating Server-Side Development with Fastify. A comprehensive guide to API development for building a scalable backend for your web apps

Manuel Spigolon, Maksim Sinik, Matteo Collina

This book is a complete guide to server-side app development in Fastify, written by the core contributors of this highly performant plugin-based web framework. Throughout the book, you’ll discover how it fosters code reuse, thereby improving your time to market.Starting with an introduction to Fastify’s fundamental concepts, this guide will lead you through the development of a real-world project while providing in-depth explanations of advanced topics to prepare you to build highly maintainable and scalable backend applications. The book offers comprehensive guidance on how to design, develop, and deploy RESTful applications, including detailed instructions for building reusable components that can be leveraged across multiple projects. The book presents guidelines for creating efficient, reliable, and easy-to-maintain real-world applications. It also offers practical advice on best practices, design patterns, and how to avoid common pitfalls encountered by developers while building backend applications.By following these guidelines and recommendations, you’ll be able to confidently design, implement, deploy, and maintain an application written in Fastify, and develop plugins and APIs to contribute to the Fastify and open source communities.

Hands-on Kubernetes on Azure. Use Azure Kubernetes Service to automate management, scaling, and deployment of containerized applications - Third Edition

Nills Franssens, Shivakumar Gopalakrishnan, Gunther Lenz

Containers and Kubernetes containers facilitate cloud deployments and application development by enabling efficient versioning with improved security and portability.With updated chapters on role-based access control, pod identity, storing secrets, and network security in AKS, this third edition begins by introducing you to containers, Kubernetes, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and guides you through deploying an AKS cluster in different ways. You will then delve into the specifics of Kubernetes by deploying a sample guestbook application on AKS and installing complex Kubernetes apps using Helm. With the help of real-world examples, you'll also get to grips with scaling your applications and clusters.As you advance, you'll learn how to overcome common challenges in AKS and secure your applications with HTTPS. You will also learn how to secure your clusters and applications in a dedicated section on security. In the final section, you’ll learn about advanced integrations, which give you the ability to create Azure databases and run serverless functions on AKS as well as the ability to integrate AKS with a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline using GitHub Actions.By the end of this Kubernetes book, you will be proficient in deploying containerized workloads on Microsoft Azure with minimal management overhead.

Raspberry Pi Gaming. Design, create, and play all kinds of video games on your Raspberry Pi computer

Shea Silverman

Unity Android Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide. Absolute beginners to designing games for Android will find this book is their passport to quick results. Lots of handholding and practical exercises using Unity 3D makes learning a breeze

Thomas Finnegan, Thomas James Finnegan

Powerful and continuing to grow, the mobile market has never been bigger and more demanding of great games. Android continues to prove itself as a strong contender in this challenging market. With Unity 3D, great games can be made for Android quickly and easily. With its great deployment system, the Android platform is now only one click away.Unity Android Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide dives straight into making real, fully-functional games, with hands-on examples and step-by-step instructions to give you a firm grounding in Unity 3D and Android. Everything necessary for creating a complete gaming experience is covered and detailed throughout the course of this book.Using clear and practical examples that progressively build upon each other, this book guides you through the process of creating games in Unity for Android.Start by learning about all the great features that Unity and Android have to offer. Next, create a Tic-Tac-Toe game while learning all about interfaces. After that, learn about meshes, materials, and animations with the creation of a tank battle game. You will then learn how to expand your game's environment with the addition of shadows and a skybox. Adding on this, you will also learn how to expand the tank battle by creating enemies and using path finding to chase the player. Next, explore touch and tilt controls with the creation of a space fighter game. Then, learn about physics while recreating the most popular mobile game on the market. You will then expand the space fighter game with the addition of all the special effects that make a game great. Finally, complete your experience by learning the optimization techniques required to keep your games running smoothly.While Unity is available for both Mac and Windows, the book is presented working from a Windows environment. Programming in Unity is possible in C#, JavaScript, and Boo. This book will be working in C# and the final projects will be provided in C# and JavaScript.From nothing to a fully-featured mobile game, Unity Android Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide takes you through everything it takes to create your next game for the Android platform.

Getting Started with Forex Trading Using Python. Beginner’s guide to the currency market and development of trading algorithms

Alex Krishtop

Algorithm-based trading is a popular choice for Python programmers due to its apparent simplicity. However, very few traders get the results they want, partly because they aren’t able to capture the complexity of the factors that influence the market. Getting Started with Forex Trading Using Python helps you understand the market and build an application that reaps desirable results.The book is a comprehensive guide to everything that is market-related: data, orders, trading venues, and risk. From the programming side, you’ll learn the general architecture of trading applications, systemic risk management, de-facto industry standards such as FIX protocol, and practical examples of using simple Python codes. You’ll gain an understanding of how to connect to data sources and brokers, implement trading logic, and perform realistic tests. Throughout the book, you’ll be encouraged to further study the intricacies of algo trading with the help of code snippets.By the end of this book, you’ll have a deep understanding of the fx market from the perspective of a professional trader. You’ll learn to retrieve market data, clean it, filter it, compress it into various formats, apply trading logic, emulate the execution of orders, and test the trading app before trading live.

Proxmox Cookbook. Over 60 hands-on recipes to perform server virtualization and manage virtualized server solutions with Proxmox

Wasim Ahmed

Proxmox VE's intuitive interface, high availability, and unique central management system puts it on par with the world’s best virtualization platforms. Its simplicity and high quality of service is what makes it the foremost choice for most system administrators.Starting with a step-by-step installation of Proxmox nodes along with an illustrated tour of Proxmox graphical user interface where you will spend most of your time managing a cluster, this book will get you up and running with the mechanisms of Proxmox VE. Various entities such as Cluster, Storage, and Firewall are also covered in an easy to understand format. You will then explore various backup solutions and restore mechanisms, thus learning to keep your applications and servers safe. Next, you will see how to upgrade a Proxmox node with a new release and apply update patches through GUI or CLI. Monitoring resources and virtual machines is required on an enterprise level, to maintain performance and uptime; to achieve this, we learn how to monitor host machine resources and troubleshoot common issues in the setup. Finally, we will walk through some advanced configurations for VM followed by a list of commands used for Proxmox and Ceph cluster through CLI.With this focused and detailed guide you will learn to work your way around with Proxmox VE quickly and add to your skillset.