Beginning C++ Game Programming. Learn C++ from scratch by building fun games - Third Edition

John Horton

Always dreamed of creating your own games? With the third edition of Beginning C++ Game Programming, you can turn that dream into reality! This beginner-friendly guide is updated and improved to include the latest features of VS 2022, SFML, and modern C++20 programming techniques. You'll get a fun introduction to game programming by building four fully playable games of increasing complexity. You'll build clones of popular games such as Timberman, Pong, a Zombie survival shooter, and an endless runner.The book starts by covering the basics of programming. You'll study key C++ topics, such as object-oriented programming (OOP) and C++ pointers and get acquainted with the Standard Template Library (STL). The book helps you learn about collision detection techniques and game physics by building a Pong game. As you build games, you'll also learn exciting game programming concepts such as vertex arrays, directional sound (spatialization), OpenGL programmable shaders, spawning objects, and much more. You’ll dive deep into game mechanics and implement input handling, levelling up a character, and simple enemy AI. Finally, you'll explore game design patterns to enhance your C++ game programming skills.By the end of the book, you'll have gained the knowledge you need to build your own games with exciting features from scratch.

Mastering QuickBooks 2021. The ultimate guide to bookkeeping and QuickBooks Online - Second Edition

Crystalynn Shelton

Intuit QuickBooks is an accounting software package that helps small business owners to manage all their bookkeeping tasks independently.This latest edition of Mastering QuickBooks takes you through the range of new features and updates available in QuickBooks Online (QBO). Creating multilingual invoices, tracking mileage, working with a cash flow dashboard that helps you with cash forecasting and planning reports, and uploading a batch of bills and checks are just a few of the new features covered in this edition. As you progress, you’ll learn how to manage sales tax, including how to set up, collect, track, pay, and report sales tax payments. Dedicated sections will also take you through new content focused on the latest features in the QBO line-up, while also showing you the different types of businesses that can benefit from QBO Advanced. In addition to this, you’ll explore how to export reports to Google Sheets, use the custom chart builder, import budgets, perform smart reporting with Fathom, and much more.By the end of this QuickBooks book, you'll be well-versed with the features of QuickBooks and have the confidence to manage all your bookkeeping tasks with ease.

VMware Horizon View Essentials. Successfully design, install, and configure an end-to-end VDI infrastructure with VMware Horizon View

Peter von Oven

Django Design Patterns and Best Practices. Industry-standard web development techniques and solutions using Python - Second Edition

Arun Ravindran

Building secure and maintainable web applications requires comprehensive knowledge. The second edition of this book not only sheds light on Django, but also encapsulates years of experience in the form of design patterns and best practices. Rather than sticking to GoF design patterns, the book looks at higher-level patterns. Using the latest version of Django and Python, you’ll learn about Channels and asyncio while building a solid conceptual background. The book compares design choices to help you make everyday decisions faster in a rapidly changing environment.You’ll first learn about various architectural patterns, many of which are used to build Django. You’ll start with building a fun superhero project by gathering the requirements, creating mockups, and setting up the project. Through project-guided examples, you’ll explore the Model, View, templates, workflows, and code reusability techniques. In addition to this, you’ll learn practical Python coding techniques in Django that’ll enable you to tackle problems related to complex topics such as legacy coding, data modeling, and code reusability.You’ll discover API design principles and best practices, and understand the need for asynchronous workflows. During this journey, you’ll study popular Python code testing techniques in Django, various web security threats and their countermeasures, and the monitoring and performance of your application.

Hands-On Machine Learning with scikit-learn and Scientific Python Toolkits. A practical guide to implementing supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms in Python

Tarek Amr

Machine learning is applied everywhere, from business to research and academia, while scikit-learn is a versatile library that is popular among machine learning practitioners. This book serves as a practical guide for anyone looking to provide hands-on machine learning solutions with scikit-learn and Python toolkits.The book begins with an explanation of machine learning concepts and fundamentals, and strikes a balance between theoretical concepts and their applications. Each chapter covers a different set of algorithms, and shows you how to use them to solve real-life problems. You’ll also learn about various key supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms using practical examples. Whether it is an instance-based learning algorithm, Bayesian estimation, a deep neural network, a tree-based ensemble, or a recommendation system, you’ll gain a thorough understanding of its theory and learn when to apply it. As you advance, you’ll learn how to deal with unlabeled data and when to use different clustering and anomaly detection algorithms.By the end of this machine learning book, you’ll have learned how to take a data-driven approach to provide end-to-end machine learning solutions. You’ll also have discovered how to formulate the problem at hand, prepare required data, and evaluate and deploy models in production.

Generative AI Application Integration Patterns. Integrate large language models into your applications

Juan Pablo Bustos, Luis Lopez Soria, Dr. Ali Arsanjani

Explore the transformative potential of GenAI in the application development lifecycle. Through concrete examples, you will go through the process of ideation and integration, understanding the tradeoffs and the decision points when integrating GenAI.With recent advances in models like Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, DALL-E and GPT-4o, this timely resource will help you harness these technologies through proven design patterns.We then delve into the practical applications of GenAI, identifying common use cases and applying design patterns to address real-world challenges. From summarization and metadata extraction to intent classification and question answering, each chapter offers practical examples and blueprints for leveraging GenAI across diverse domains and tasks. You will learn how to fine-tune models for specific applications, progressing from basic prompting to sophisticated strategies such as retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and chain of thought.Additionally, we provide end-to-end guidance on operationalizing models, including data prep, training, deployment, and monitoring. We also focus on responsible and ethical development techniques for transparency, auditing, and governance as crucial design patterns.

Professional Cloud Architect - Google Cloud Certification Guide. A handy guide to designing, developing, and managing enterprise-grade GCP cloud solutions

Konrad Cłapa, Brian Gerrard

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the leading cloud service suites and offers solutions for storage, analytics, big data, machine learning, and application development. It features an array of services that can help organizations to get the best out of their infrastructure. This comprehensive guide covers a variety of topics specific to Google's Professional Cloud Architect official exam syllabus and guides you in using the right methods for effective use of GCP services.You'll start by exploring GCP, understanding the benefits of becoming a certified architect, and learning how to register for the exam. You'll then delve into the core services that GCP offers such as computing, storage, and security. As you advance, this GCP book will help you get up to speed with methods to scale and automate your cloud infrastructure and delve into containers and services. In the concluding chapters, you'll discover security best practices and even gain insights into designing applications with GCP services and monitoring your infrastructure as a GCP architect.By the end of this book, you will be well versed in all the topics required to pass Google's Professional Cloud Architect exam and use GCP services effectively.

Arduino BLINK Blueprints. Get the most out of your Arduino to develop exciting and creative LED-based projects

Samarth Shah, Utsav Shah

Arduino is an open-source prototyping platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. Arduino has been used in thousands of different projects and applications by a wide range of programmers and artists, and their contributions have added up to an incredible amount of accessible knowledge that can be of great help to novices and experts alike.Want to build exciting LED projects with Arduino? This book will be your companion to bring out the creative genius in you. To begin with, you will get introduced to the maker movement and the open source hardware development Arduino boards. You will then move on to develop a mood lamp and a remote-controlled TV backlight. As you progress through the book, you will develop an LED cube and will learn to use sound visualization to develop a sound-controlled LED Christmas tree. You will then move on to build a persistence of vision wand.At the end of each chapter, you’ll see some common problems, their solutions, and some workarounds.