Hands-On Image Generation with TensorFlow. A practical guide to generating images and videos using deep learning

Soon Yau Cheong

The emerging field of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has made it possible to generate indistinguishable images from existing datasets. With this hands-on book, you’ll not only develop image generation skills but also gain a solid understanding of the underlying principles.Starting with an introduction to the fundamentals of image generation using TensorFlow, this book covers Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and GANs. You’ll discover how to build models for different applications as you get to grips with performing face swaps using deepfakes, neural style transfer, image-to-image translation, turning simple images into photorealistic images, and much more. You’ll also understand how and why to construct state-of-the-art deep neural networks using advanced techniques such as spectral normalization and self-attention layer before working with advanced models for face generation and editing. You'll also be introduced to photo restoration, text-to-image synthesis, video retargeting, and neural rendering. Throughout the book, you’ll learn to implement models from scratch in TensorFlow 2.x, including PixelCNN, VAE, DCGAN, WGAN, pix2pix, CycleGAN, StyleGAN, GauGAN, and BigGAN.By the end of this book, you'll be well versed in TensorFlow and be able to implement image generative technologies confidently.

Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development: Beginner's Guide. You don't need to know anything about game development or computer programming when you use the Stencyl toolkit. This book guides you through the whole process of creating a game, publishing and profiting from it

lnnes Borkwood, INNES BORKWOOD

Creating video games has traditionally been a long and complicated process, requiring years of experience and a vast array of skills. However, with the introduction of comprehensive game-development toolkits such as Stencyl, the fun has returned to the art of game-creation ‚Äì anyone who has the desire to create their own video game can now do so with almost any desktop computer and a free software download from the Internet!Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development: Beginner's Guide will put you on the fast-track to learning the essentials of the powerful Stencyl game-development toolkit. You will develop a complete, ready-to-publish video game including in-game advertising, by following the clear, step-by-step tutorials, supported by numerous screenshots and practical examples.This book will guide you through all the important steps required to develop and publish your video game. Starting with the installation and testing of the Stencyl toolkit, you will very quickly advance to the fun and exciting process of creating a playable game. The step-by-step tutorials will guide you from a blank screen, right through to giving your game that final polish and sharing it with the rest of the world.Whilst developing your feature-complete video game, you will learn how to easily detect collisions in your game using Stencyl's built-in physics engine. You'll discover how to use the powerful animation tools included in Stencyl's toolkit, and you'll find out how to make your game shine with sounds and visual special effects. You will also discover how Stencyl makes it easy to utilize the touch-screen and accelerometer features of smartphones and tablet computers.You will learn all the essential skills required to develop a video game from scratch ‚Äì right through to publishing a game on the Internet and testing games  on the most popular mobile devices.

RabbitMQ Essentials. Build distributed and scalable applications with message queuing using RabbitMQ - Second Edition

Lovisa Johansson, David Dossot

RabbitMQ is an open source message queuing software that acts as a message broker using the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). This book will help you to get to grips with RabbitMQ to build your own applications with a message queue architecture. You’ll learn from the experts from CloudAMQP as they share what they've learned while managing the largest fleet of RabbitMQ clusters in the world.Following the case study of Complete Car, you’ll discover how you can use RabbitMQ to provide exceptional customer service and user experience, and see how a message queue architecture makes it easy to upgrade the app and add features as the company grows. From implementing simple synchronous operations through to advanced message routing and tracking, you’ll explore how RabbitMQ streamlines scalable operations for fast distribution. This book will help you understand the advantages of message queue architecture, including application scalability, resource efficiency, and user reliability. Finally, you’ll learn best practices for working with RabbitMQ and be able to use this book as a reference guide for your future app development projects.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to use message queuing software to streamline the development of your distributed and scalable applications.

Joomla! Web Security. Secure your Joomla! website from common security threats with this easy-to-use guide

Chris Davenport, Tom Canavan

The Manager's Guide to Mediating Conflict. Learn how to confidently mediate conflicts in the workplace

Alison J Love

Experienced mediator, trainer, and business mentor Alison Love brings her insight into the nuances and subtleties of workplace conflict, to help you develop the vital communication skills that lie at the heart of good leadership. Emotional intelligence often passes unspoken in discussions about management but here Alison places it at the forefront, as a key component of management.Built around the process of mediation, Alison shows you precisely how mediation works, while also offering you invaluable information that will be integral for any manager interested in creating a team and a workplace committed and dedicated to a shared goal. From understanding the causes of conflict in the modern workplace to sustaining the results of a successful mediation, Alison aims to give you both the knowledge and the skills to be successful at this integral component of management.Conflict is an inevitable part of the workplace. Often it can be constructive, but it is more frequently, destructive and damaging. When it is not managed effectively it can cripple morale and productivity and lead even to stress and ill health. One of the most effective forms of conflict management is mediation, which provides a formal structure through which conflicting parties can articulate their perspectives, with the aim of reaching a resolution through this formalised discussion. Beginning with the causes of conflict in the modern workplace, this book then takes you through the entire mediation process, providing you with clear, practical steps on how to plan and conduct a mediation to how to sustain the results once the process has been completed. With tools and templates that make what may seem like a difficult process manageable, the book is an essential tool for manager’s concerned about how to deal with conflict at work.

Building a RESTful Web Service with Spring. A hands-on guide to building an enterprise-grade, scalable RESTful web service using the Spring Framework

Ludovic Dewailly

Realize Enterprise Architecture with AWS and SAFe. A comprehensive, hands-on guide to AWS with Agile and TOGAF

Rajnish Harjika

Agile implementation of enterprise architecture (EA) in the cloud is a powerful organizational tool, but it is challenging, particularly for architects who are used to on-premises environments. This in-depth guide will tell you all you need to know to reap the benefits of applying EA in your organization to achieve operational efficiency.Starting with an overview of the foundations of enterprise architecture, you'll see how it can be applied to AWS as well as explore the frameworks AWS provides for EA, such as the AWS Well-Architected Framework. That's not all – the book shows you how these frameworks align with The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) architecture development method (ADM) and the Zachman Framework so that you can choose the right fit for your organization. As you advance, you'll learn how to apply SAFe to make your organization agile as well as efficient. Once you've gotten to grips with the theory, you can explore use cases and take a quiz at the end of the book to test yourself and see how EA is applied in practice.By the end of this enterprise architecture book, you'll have the skills and knowledge required to apply EA in the cloud with AWS and drive your organization to become super-efficient and agile.

Implementing Event-Driven Microservices Architecture in .NET 7. Develop event-based distributed apps that can scale with ever-changing business demands using C# 11 and .NET 7

Donovan Brown, Joshua Garverick, Omar Dean McIver

This book will guide you through various hands-on practical examples for implementing event-driven microservices architecture using C# 11 and .NET 7. It has been divided into three distinct sections, each focusing on different aspects of this implementation.The first section will cover the new features of .NET 7 that will make developing applications using EDA patterns easier, the sample application that will be used throughout the book, and how the core tenets of domain-driven design (DDD) are implemented in .NET 7.The second section will review the various components of a local environment setup, the containerization of code, testing, deployment, and the observability of microservices using an EDA approach.The third section will guide you through the need for scalability and service resilience within the application, along with implementation details related to elastic and autoscale components. You’ll also cover how proper telemetry helps to automatically drive scaling events. In addition, the topic of observability is revisited using examples of service discovery and microservice inventories.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to identify and catalog domains, events, and bounded contexts to be used for the design and development of a resilient microservices architecture.