Building AI Intensive Python Applications. Create intelligent apps with LLMs and vector databases

Rachelle Palmer, Ben Perlmutter, Ashwin Gangadhar, Nicholas Larew, ...

The era of generative AI is upon us, and this book serves as a roadmap to harness its full potential. With its help, you’ll learn the core components of the AI stack: large language models (LLMs), vector databases, and Python frameworks, and see how these technologies work together to create intelligent applications.The chapters will help you discover best practices for data preparation, model selection, and fine-tuning, and teach you advanced techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to overcome common challenges, such as hallucinations and data leakage. You’ll get a solid understanding of vector databases, implement effective vector search strategies, refine models for accuracy, and optimize performance to achieve impactful results. You’ll also identify and address AI failures to ensure your applications deliver reliable and valuable results. By evaluating and improving the output of LLMs, you’ll be able to enhance their performance and relevance.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to build sophisticated AI applications that deliver real-world value.

Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook. With this highly focused book you’ll learn how to bring your characters to life using Blender, employing everything from realistic movement to refined eye control. Written in a user-friendly manner, it’s the only guide dedicated to this subject

Virgilio Vasconcelos, Virgilio Carlo de Menezes Vasconcelos, Ton Roosendaal

Blender is an open source 3D graphics application that can be used for modeling, rigging, animating, rendering and thousands of other things. While modeling characters isn't the biggest of your worries, animating them to make them feel as-good-as alive is what differentiates a professional from an amateur. This book offers clear, illustrative, and easy-to-follow recipes to create character rigs and animations for common situations. Bring your characters to life by understanding the principles, techniques and approaches involved in creating rigs and animations, you'll be able to adapt them to your own characters and films. The book offers clear step-by-step tutorials, with detailed explanations, screenshots and support files to help you understand the principles behind each topic. Each recipe covers a logical step of the complete creation of a character rig and animation, so you're not overwhelmed with too much information at once.You'll see numerous examples and screenshots that guide to achieve various rigging and animation tasks, logically separated so you can understand each in detail. The rigging topics are divided by each region of the body (torso, limbs, face, eyes), and further separated by the specific topic (neck, fingers, mouth, eyelids, etc) for clarity. All rigging tasks are accomplished with the built-in tools in Blender, without the complexity of coding custom Python behaviors or user interface elements.The animation topics deal with common situations found in real world productions, showing good practices to understand and overcome the challenges.

Business Process Execution Language for Web Services

Poornachandra Sarang, Matjaz B. Juric, Benny Mathew, Poornachandra G Sarang, ...

Web services provide the basic technical platform required for application interoperability. They do not, however, provide higher level control, such as which web services need to be invoked, which operations should be called and in what sequence. Nor do they provide ways to describe the semantics of interfaces, the workflows, or e-business processes. BPEL is the missing link to assemble and integrate web services into a real business process BPEL4WS standardizes process automation between web services. This applies both within the enterprise, where BPEL4WS is used to integrate previously isolated systems, and between enterprises, where BPEL4WS enables easier and more effective integration with business partners. In providing a standard descriptive structure BPEL4WS enables enterprises to define their business processes during the design phase. Wider business benefits can flow from this through business process optimization, reengineering, and the selection of most appropriate processes . Supported by major vendorsó including BEA, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, SAP, Sun, and othersó BPEL4WS is becoming the accepted standard for business process management.This book provides detailed coverage of BPEL4WS, its syntax, and where, and how, it is used. It begins with an overview of web services, showing both the foundation of, and need for, BPEL. The web services orchestration stack is explained, including standards such as WS-Security, WS-Coordination, WS-Transaction, WS-Addressing, and others. The BPEL language itself is explained in detail, with Code snippets and complete examples illustrating both its syntax and typical construction. Having covered BPEL itself, the book then goes on to show BPEL is used in context. by providing an overview of major BPEL4WS servers. It covers the Oracle BPEL Process Manager and Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 in detail, and shows how to write BPEL4WS solutions using these servers.

From PHP to Ruby on Rails. Transition from PHP to Ruby by leveraging your existing backend programming knowledge

Bernard Pineda

Are you a PHP developer looking to take your first steps into the world of Ruby development? From PHP to Ruby on Rails will help you leverage your existing knowledge to gain expertise in Ruby on Rails. With a focus on bridging the gap between PHP and Ruby, this guide will help you develop the Ruby mindset, set up your local environment, grasp the syntax, master scripting, explore popular Ruby frameworks, and find out about libraries and gems.This book offers a unique take on Ruby from the perspective of a seasoned PHP developer who initially refused to learn other technologies, but never looked back after taking the leap. As such, it teaches with a language-agnostic approach that will help you feel at home in any programming language without learning everything from scratch. This approach will help you avoid common mistakes such as writing Ruby as if it were PHP and increase your understanding of the programming ecosystem as a whole.By the end of this book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of Ruby, its ecosystem, and how it compares to PHP, enabling you to build robust and scalable applications using Ruby on Rails.

AWS FinOps Simplified. Eliminate cloud waste through practical FinOps

Peter Chung

Much like how DevOps is a combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that advocate a collaborative working relationship between development and IT operations, FinOps encourages the same collaboration between technology and finance team, making it key relationship to establish and maintain for any thriving business.This book will help you understand how organizations with a mature FinOps practice can decentralize cost ownership to developer teams and encourage cross-functional collaboration between business, finance, and technology, enabling speed, innovation, and business growth. You’ll focus on structuring your organization to form the right FinOps team, including a Cloud Center of Excellence, and learn how to implement practical cost savings measures with AWS tools to optimize costs in both the short as well as long term.By the end of this cloud FinOps book, you’ll be ready to implement a successful Cloud FinOps practice for your organization to get the best value from the AWS cloud for your workloads.

Scala Test-Driven Development. Write clean scala code that works

Gaurav Sood

Test-driven development (TDD) produces high-quality applications in less time than is possible with traditional methods. Due to the systematic nature of TDD, the application is tested in individual units as well as cumulatively, right from the design stage, to ensure optimum performance and reduced debugging costs. This step-by-step guide shows you how to use the principles of TDD and built-in Scala testing modules to write clean and fully tested Scala code and give your workflow the change it needs to let you create better applications than ever before. After an introduction to TDD, you will learn the basics of ScalaTest, one of the most flexible and most popular testing tools around for Scala, by building your first fully test-driven application. Building on from that you will learn about the ScalaTest API and how to refactor code to produce high-quality applications. We’ll teach you the concepts of BDD (Behavior-driven development) and you’ll see how to add functional tests to the existing suite of tests. You’ll be introduced to the concepts of Mocks and Stubs and will learn to increase test coverage using properties. With a concluding chapter on miscellaneous tools, this book will enable you to write better quality code that is easily maintainable and watch your apps change for the better.

Learn Amazon SageMaker. A guide to building, training, and deploying machine learning models for developers and data scientists - Second Edition

Julien Simon

Amazon SageMaker enables you to quickly build, train, and deploy machine learning models at scale without managing any infrastructure. It helps you focus on the machine learning problem at hand and deploy high-quality models by eliminating the heavy lifting typically involved in each step of the ML process. This second edition will help data scientists and ML developers to explore new features such as SageMaker Data Wrangler, Pipelines, Clarify, Feature Store, and much more.You'll start by learning how to use various capabilities of SageMaker as a single toolset to solve ML challenges and progress to cover features such as AutoML, built-in algorithms and frameworks, and writing your own code and algorithms to build ML models. The book will then show you how to integrate Amazon SageMaker with popular deep learning libraries, such as TensorFlow and PyTorch, to extend the capabilities of existing models. You'll also see how automating your workflows can help you get to production faster with minimum effort and at a lower cost. Finally, you'll explore SageMaker Debugger and SageMaker Model Monitor to detect quality issues in training and production.By the end of this Amazon book, you'll be able to use Amazon SageMaker on the full spectrum of ML workflows, from experimentation, training, and monitoring to scaling, deployment, and automation.

Learning JavaScript Robotics. Design, build, and program your own remarkable robots with JavaScript and open source hardware

Kassandra Perch