Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook. Achieving near photographic realism in your 3D models is within easy reach once you’ve learnt the finer points of using materials and textures in Blender. Over 80 recipes cover everything from human faces to flames and explosions

Ton Roosendaal, Colin Litster

Blender 2.5 is one of the most usable 3D suites available. Its material and texture functions offer spectacular surface creation possibilities. It can take you hours just to create basic textures and materials in Blender and when you think of creating complex materials and textures you are petrified. Imagine how you will feel when you overcome these obstacles.This book wastes no time on boring theory and bombards you with examples of ready-created materials and textures from the start, with clear instructions on how they were created, and what you can learn from them for making your own. It covers all core Blender functions you will ever need to easily create perfect simulation of objects from the simplest to the most complex ones.The book begins with recipes that show you how to create natural surface materials, including a variety of pebbles, rocks, wood, and water, as well as man-made metals, complete with rust. By utilizing some of the easiest-to-use animation tools available, you will be able to produce accurate movement in mesh objects. Familiarize yourself with a plethora of tools that will help you to effectively organize your textures and materials.You will learn how to emulate the reflective properties of natural materials and how to simulate materials such as rusted iron, which is difficult to make believable. Transparency and reflection are both tricky natural surface properties to simulate but these recipes will make it easy. Explore ways to speed up animations by using special painting techniques to significantly lower render times. By the end of the book, you will be able to simulate some of the most difficult effects to recreate in any 3D suite, such as smoke, fire, and explosions.

Mastering Node.js Web Development. Go on a comprehensive journey from the fundamentals to advanced web development with Node.js

Adam Freeman

Dive into the world of Node.js with this comprehensive guide, taking you from foundational concepts to practical web development mastery. Written by an industry veteran with over 50 programming books under his belt, this book will help both beginners and seasoned developers.Gain a deep understanding of the most important server-side features in web development with Node.js. The first part of the book will get you up to speed with basic features of Node.js and TypeScript. In the second part, you’ll elevate your skills by creating simplified implementations of key server-side features to understand how they work and how they are presented to clients. Armed with the understanding gained from implementing each feature, you will be able to replace custom code with production-ready open-source packages.The third part will help you understand how server-side features are combined for practical web development. Using Adam Freeman’s signature SportsStore application, you will learn how to develop client and server-side components, culminating in a thorough application deployment preparation.By the end of this Node.js book, you will be able to build and deploy server applications to support HTTP clients, including JavaScript applications created with frameworks such as Angular and React.

Applied Supervised Learning with Python. Use scikit-learn to build predictive models from real-world datasets and prepare yourself for the future of machine learning

Benjamin Johnston, Ishita Mathur

Machine learning—the ability of a machine to give right answers based on input data—has revolutionized the way we do business. Applied Supervised Learning with Python provides a rich understanding of how you can apply machine learning techniques in your data science projects using Python. You'll explore Jupyter Notebooks, the technology used commonly in academic and commercial circles with in-line code running support.With the help of fun examples, you'll gain experience working on the Python machine learning toolkit—from performing basic data cleaning and processing to working with a range of regression and classification algorithms. Once you’ve grasped the basics, you'll learn how to build and train your own models using advanced techniques such as decision trees, ensemble modeling, validation, and error metrics. You'll also learn data visualization techniques using powerful Python libraries such as Matplotlib and Seaborn. This book also covers ensemble modeling and random forest classifiers along with other methods for combining results from multiple models, and concludes by delving into cross-validation to test your algorithm and check how well the model works on unseen data.By the end of this book, you'll be equipped to not only work with machine learning algorithms, but also be able to create some of your own!

Mastering Node.js. Expert techniques for building fast servers and scalable, real-time network applications with minimal effort

Sandro Pasquali

Node.js is a modern development stack focused on providing an easy way to build scalable network software. Backed by a growing number of large companies and a rapidly increasing developer base, Node is revolutionizing the way that software is being built today. Powered by Google's V8 engine and built out of C++ modules, this is a JavaScript environment for the enterprise.Mastering Node.js will take the reader deep into this exciting development environment. Beginning with a comprehensive breakdown of its innovative non-blocking evented design, Node's structure is explained in detail, laying out how its blazingly fast I/O performance simplifies the creation of fast servers, scalable architectures, and responsive web applications.Mastering Node.js takes you through a concise yet thorough tour of Node's innovative evented non-blocking design, showing you how to build professional applications with the help of detailed examples.Learn how to integrate your applications with Facebook and Twitter, Amazon and Google, creating social apps and programs reaching thousands of collaborators on the cloud. See how the Express and Path frameworks make the creation of professional web applications painless. Set up one, two, or an entire server cluster with just a few lines of code, ready to scale as soon as you're ready to launch. Move data seamlessly between databases and file systems, between clients, and across network protocols, using a beautifully designed, consistent, and predictable set of tools.Mastering Node.js contains all of the examples and explanations you'll need to build applications in a short amount of time and at a low cost, running on a scale and speed that would have been nearly impossible just a few years ago.

XNA 4 3D Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide. Create action-packed 3D games with the Microsoft XNA Framework with this book and

Kurt Jaegers

Move beyond the world of flat 2D-based game development and discover how to create your own exciting 3D games with Microsoft XNA 4.0. Create a 3D maze, fire shells at enemy tanks, and drive a rover on the surface of Mars while being attacked by alien saucers.XNA 4 3D Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide takes you step-by-step through the creation of three different 3D video games with Microsoft XNA 4.0. Learn by doing as you explore the worlds of 3D graphics and game design.This book takes a step-by-step approach to building 3D games with Microsoft XNA, describing each section of code in depth and explaining the topics and concepts covered in detail. From the basics of a 3D camera system to an introduction to writing DirectX shader code, the games in this book cover a wide variety of both 3D graphics and game design topics. Generate random mazes, load and animate 3D models, create particle-based explosions, and combine 2D and 3D techniques to build a user interface.XNA 4 3D Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide will give you the knowledge to bring your own 3D game creations to life.

Keycloak - Identity and Access Management for Modern Applications. Harness the power of Keycloak, OpenID Connect, and OAuth 2.0 to secure applications - Second Edition

Stian Thorgersen, Pedro Igor Silva

The 2nd Edition of Keycloak - Identity and Access Management for Modern Applications is an updated, comprehensive introduction to Keycloak and its updates.In this new edition, you will learn how to use the latest distribution of Keycloak. The recent versions of Keycloak are now based on Quarkus, which brings a new and improved user experience and a new admin console with a higher focus on usability. You will see how to leverage Spring Security, instead of the Keycloak Spring adapter, while using the latest distribution of Keycloak. As you progress, you will understand the new Keycloak distribution and explore best practices in using OAuth. Finally, you'll cover general best practices and other information on how to protect your applications.By the end of this new edition, you will have learned how to install and manage the latest version of Keycloak to secure new and existing applications using the newest features.

AWS Security Cookbook. Practical solutions for managing security policies, monitoring, auditing, and compliance with AWS

Heartin Kanikathottu

As a security consultant, securing your infrastructure by implementing policies and following best practices is critical. This cookbook discusses practical solutions to the most common problems related to safeguarding infrastructure, covering services and features within AWS that can help you implement security models such as the CIA triad (confidentiality, integrity, and availability), and the AAA triad (authentication, authorization, and availability), along with non-repudiation.The book begins with IAM and S3 policies and later gets you up to speed with data security, application security, monitoring, and compliance. This includes everything from using firewalls and load balancers to secure endpoints, to leveraging Cognito for managing users and authentication. Over the course of this book, you'll learn to use AWS security services such as Config for monitoring, as well as maintain compliance with GuardDuty, Macie, and Inspector. Finally, the book covers cloud security best practices and demonstrates how you can integrate additional security services such as Glacier Vault Lock and Security Hub to further strengthen your infrastructure.By the end of this book, you'll be well versed in the techniques required for securing AWS deployments, along with having the knowledge to prepare for the AWS Certified Security – Specialty certification.

Network Science with Python and NetworkX Quick Start Guide. Explore and visualize network data effectively

Edward L. Platt

NetworkX is a leading free and open source package used for network science with the Python programming language. NetworkX can track properties of individuals and relationships, find communities, analyze resilience, detect key network locations, and perform a wide range of important tasks. With the recent release of version 2, NetworkX has been updated to be more powerful and easy to use.If you’re a data scientist, engineer, or computational social scientist, this book will guide you in using the Python programming language to gain insights into real-world networks. Starting with the fundamentals, you’ll be introduced to the core concepts of network science, along with examples that use real-world data and Python code. This book will introduce you to theoretical concepts such as scale-free and small-world networks, centrality measures, and agent-based modeling. You’ll also be able to look for scale-free networks in real data and visualize a network using circular, directed, and shell layouts.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to choose appropriate network representations, use NetworkX to build and characterize networks, and uncover insights while working with real-world systems.