Microsoft Power BI Cookbook. Creating Business Intelligence Solutions of Analytical Data Models, Reports, and Dashboards

Brett Powell, Gilbert Quevauvilliers

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence and analytics platform consisting of applications and services designed to provide coherent, visual and interactive insights of data.This book will provide thorough, technical examples of using all primary Power BI tools and features as well as demonstrate high impact end-to-end solutions that leverage and integrate these technologies and services. Get familiar with Power BI development tools and services, go deep into the data connectivity and transformation, modeling, visualization and analytical capabilities of Power BI, and see Power BI’s functional programming languages of DAX and M come alive to deliver powerful solutions to address common, challenging scenarios in business intelligence.This book will excite and empower you to get more out of Power BI via detailed recipes, advanced design and development tips, and guidance on enhancing existing Power BI projects.

Building Blockchain Projects. Building decentralized Blockchain applications with Ethereum and Solidity

Narayan Prusty

Blockchain is a decentralized ledger that maintains a continuously growing list of data records that are secured from tampering and revision. Every user is allowed to connectto the network, send new transactions to it, verify transactions, and create new blocks,making it permission-less.This book will teach you what blockchain is, how it maintains data integrity, and how to create real-world blockchain projects using Ethereum. With interesting real-worldprojects, you will learn how to write smart contracts which run exactly as programmedwithout any chance of fraud, censorship, or third-party interference, and build end-to-eapplications for blockchain.You will learn about concepts such as cryptography in cryptocurrencies, ether security, mining, smart contracts, solidity, and more. You will also learn about web sockets, various API services for Ethereum, and much more.The blockchain is the main technical innovation of bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for bitcoin transactions.

Burp Suite Cookbook. Practical recipes to help you master web penetration testing with Burp Suite

Sunny Wear

Burp Suite is a Java-based platform for testing the security of your web applications, and has been adopted widely by professional enterprise testers.The Burp Suite Cookbook contains recipes to tackle challenges in determining and exploring vulnerabilities in web applications. You will learn how to uncover security flaws with various test cases for complex environments. After you have configured Burp for your environment, you will use Burp tools such as Spider, Scanner, Intruder, Repeater, and Decoder, among others, to resolve specific problems faced by pentesters. You will also explore working with various modes of Burp and then perform operations on the web. Toward the end, you will cover recipes that target specific test scenarios and resolve them using best practices.By the end of the book, you will be up and running with deploying Burp for securing web applications.

Kotlin Blueprints. A practical guide to building industry-grade web, mobile, and desktop applications in Kotlin using frameworks such as Spring Boot and Node.js

Ashish Belagali, Akshay Chordiya, Hardik Trivedi

Kotlin is a powerful language that has applications in a wide variety of fields. It is a concise, safe, interoperable, and tool-friendly language. The Android team has also announced first-class support for Kotlin, which is an added boost to the language. Kotlin’s growth is fueled through carefully designed business and technology benefits.The collection of projects demonstrates the versatility of the language and enables you to build standalone applications on your own. You’ll build comprehensive applications using the various features of Kotlin. Scale, performance, and high availability lie at the heart of the projects, and the lessons learned throughout this book.You’ll learn how to build a social media aggregator app that will help you efficiently track various feeds, develop a geospatial webservice with Kotlin and Spring Boot, build responsive web applications with Kotlin, build a REST API for a news feed reader, and build a server-side chat application with Kotlin.It also covers the various libraries and frameworks used in the projects. Through the course of building applications, you’ll not only get to grips with the various features of Kotlin, but you’ll also discover how to design and prototype professional-grade applications.

Python Network Programming. Conquer all your networking challenges with the powerful Python language

Abhishek Ratan, Eric Chou, Pradeeban Kathiravelu, Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker

This Learning Path highlights major aspects of Python network programming such as writing simple networking clients, creating and deploying SDN and NFV systems, and extending your network with Mininet. You’ll also learn how to automate legacy and the latest network devices. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll use Python for DevOps and open source tools to test, secure, and analyze your network. Toward the end, you'll develop client-side applications, such as web API clients, email clients, SSH, and FTP, using socket programming.By the end of this Learning Path, you will have learned how to analyze a network's security vulnerabilities using advanced network packet capture and analysis techniques. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products:• Practical Network Automation by Abhishek Ratan • Mastering Python Networking by Eric Chou • Python Network Programming Cookbook, Second Edition by Pradeeban Kathiravelu, Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker

Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming. Add powerful, believable, and fun AI entities in your game with the power of Unity 2018! - Fourth Edition

Dr. Davide Aversa, Aung Sithu Kyaw, Clifford Peters

Developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for game characters in Unity 2018 has never been easier. Unity provides game and app developers with a variety of tools to implement AI, from the basic techniques to cutting-edge machine learning-powered agents. Leveraging these tools via Unity's API or built-in features allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating your game's worlds and characters.This fourth edition with Unity will help you break down AI into simple concepts to give you a fundamental understanding of the topic to build upon. Using a variety of examples, the book then takes those concepts and walks you through actual implementations designed to highlight key concepts and features related to game AI in Unity.Further on, you'll learn how to distinguish the state machine pattern and implement one of your own. This is followed by learning how to implement a basic sensory system for your AI agent and coupling it with a Finite State Machine (FSM).Next, you'll learn how to use Unity's built-in NavMesh feature and implement your own A* pathfinding system. You'll then learn how to implement simple ?ocks and crowd dynamics, which are key AI concepts in Unity. Moving on, you'll learn how to implement a behavior tree through a game-focused example. Lastly, you'll apply all the concepts in the book to build a popular game.

The Agile Developer's Handbook. Get more value from your software development: get the best out of the Agile methodology

Paul Flewelling

This book will help you overcome the common challenges you’ll face when transforming your working practices from waterfall to Agile. Each chapter builds on the last, starting with easy-to-grasp ways to get going with Agile. Next you’ll see how to choose the right Agile framework for your organization. Moving on, you’ll implement systematic product delivery and measure and report progress with visualization. Then you’ll learn how to create high performing teams, develop people in Agile, manage in Agile, and perform distributed Agile and collaborative governance.At the end of the book, you’ll discover how Agile will help your company progressively deliver software to customers, increase customer satisfaction, and improve the level of efficiency in software development teams.

Advanced Infrastructure Penetration Testing. Defend your systems from methodized and proficient attackers

Chiheb Chebbi

It has always been difficult to gain hands-on experience and a comprehensive understanding of advanced penetration testing techniques and vulnerability assessment and management. This book will be your one-stop solution to compromising complex network devices and modern operating systems. This book provides you with advanced penetration testing techniques that will help you exploit databases, web and application servers, switches or routers, Docker, VLAN, VoIP, and VPN.With this book, you will explore exploitation abilities such as offensive PowerShell tools and techniques, CI servers, database exploitation, Active Directory delegation, kernel exploits, cron jobs, VLAN hopping, and Docker breakouts. Moving on, this book will not only walk you through managing vulnerabilities, but will also teach you how to ensure endpoint protection. Toward the end of this book, you will also discover post-exploitation tips, tools, and methodologies to help your organization build an intelligent security system.By the end of this book, you will have mastered the skills and methodologies needed to breach infrastructures and provide complete endpoint protection for your system.