Publisher: Packt Publishing
Founded in 2004 in Birmingham, UK, Packt's mission is to help the world put software to work in new ways, through the delivery of effective learning and information services to IT professionals. Working towards that vision, we have published over 6,500 books and videos so far, providing IT professionals with the actionable knowledge they need to get the job done - whether that's specific learning on an emerging technology or optimizing key skills in more established tools. As part of our mission, we have also awarded over $1,000,000 through our Open Source Project Royalty scheme, helping numerous projects become household names along the way.
273
Ebook

C# 7 and .NET Core: Modern Cross-Platform Development. Create powerful cross-platform applications using C# 7, .NET Core, and Visual Studio 2017 or Visual Studio Code - Second Edition

Mark J. Price

If you want to build powerful cross-platform applications with C# 7 and .NET Core, then this book is for you.First, we’ll run you through the basics of C#, as well as object-oriented programming, before taking a quick tour through the latest features of C# 7 such as tuples, pattern matching, out variables, and so on.After quickly taking you through C# and how .NET works, we’ll dive into the .NET Standard 1.6 class libraries, covering topics such as performance, monitoring, debugging, serialization and encryption.The final section will demonstrate the major types of application that you can build and deploy cross-device and cross-platform. In this section, we’ll cover Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps, web applications, mobile apps, and web services. Lastly, we’ll look at how you can package and deploy your applications so that they can be hosted on all of today’s most popular platforms, including Linux and Docker.By the end of the book, you’ll be armed with all the knowledge you need to build modern, cross-platform applications using C# and .NET Core.

274
Ebook

Rust Programming By Example. Enter the world of Rust by building engaging, concurrent, reactive, and robust applications

Guillaume Gomez, Antoni Boucher

Rust is an open source, safe, concurrent, practical language created by Mozilla. It runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees safety. This book gets you started with essential software development by guiding you through the different aspects of Rust programming. With this approach, you can bridge the gap between learning and implementing immediately. Beginning with an introduction to Rust, you’ll learn the basic aspects such as its syntax, data types, functions, generics, control flows, and more. After this, you’ll jump straight into building your first project, a Tetris game. Next you’ll build a graphical music player and work with fast, reliable networking software using Tokio, the scalable and productive asynchronous IO Rust library. Over the course of this book, you’ll explore various features of Rust Programming including its SDL features, event loop, File I/O, and the famous GTK+ widget toolkit. Through these projects, you’ll see how well Rust performs in terms of concurrency—including parallelism, reliability, improved performance, generics, macros, and thread safety. We’ll also cover some asynchronous and reactive programming aspects of Rust.By the end of the book, you’ll be comfortable building various real-world applications in Rust.

275
Ebook

Learning Azure Functions. Build scalable cloud systems with serverless architecture

Mitesh Soni, Manisha Yadav

Functions help you easily run small pieces of code in cloud with Azure functions without worrying about a whole application or the infrastructure to run it. With Azure functions, you can use triggers to execute your code and bindings to simplify the input and output of your code. This book will start with the basics of Azure Functions. You will learn the steps to set up the environment and the tools that we will be using in the further chapters. Once you have a better understanding of this, we will be creating our first hello world function app. Later you will be introduced to triggers, how they are used to activate a function, and how binding can be used to output results of a function.You will also explore the steps to create an assembly with complex functionality that can be used by functions. Next, this book will teach you to scale your functions and use them to process data, integrate systems, and build simple APIs and microservices. Finally, this book will cover some diagnostic techniques with Azure App services and best practices of working with Azure Functions. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with the techniques of scaling your Azure functions and making the most of serverless architecture.

276
Ebook

WSO2 Developer's Guide. SOA and data services with WSO2 Enterprise Integrator

Ramón Garrido, Fidel Prieto Estrada

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator brings together the most powerful servers provided by the WSO2 company for your SOA infrastructure. As an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), WSO2 Enterprise Integrator provides greater flexibility and agility to meet growing enterprise demands, whereas, as a Data Services Server (DSS), it provides an easy-to-use platform for integrating data stores, creating composite views across different data sources, and hosting data services. Using real-world scenarios, this book helps you build a solid foundation in developing enterprise applications with powerful data integration capabilities using the WSO2 servers.The book gets you started by brushing up your knowledge about SOA architecture and how it can be implemented through WSO2. It will help build your expertise with the core concepts of ESB such as building proxies, sequences, endpoints, and how to work with these in WSO2.Going further, you will also get well-acquainted with DSS data service concepts such as configuring data services, tasks, events, testing, and much more. The book will also cover API management techniques. Along with ESB and DSS, you will also learn about business process servers, the rules server and other components that together provide the control and robustness your enterprise applications will need. With practical use cases, the book covers typical daily scenarios you will come across while using these servers to give you hands-on experience.

277
Ebook

Learning Microsoft Cognitive Services. Leverage Machine Learning APIs to build smart applications - Second Edition

Leif Larsen

Microsoft has revamped its Project Oxford to launch the all new Cognitive Services platform-a set of 30 APIs to add speech, vision, language, and knowledge capabilities to apps.This book will introduce you to 24 of the APIs released as part of Cognitive Services platform and show you how to leverage their capabilities. More importantly, you'll see how the power of these APIs can be combined to build real-world apps that have cognitive capabilities. The book is split into three sections: computer vision, speech recognition and language processing, and knowledge and search.You will be taken through the vision APIs at first as this is very visual, and not too complex. The next part revolves around speech and language, which are somewhat connected. The last part is about adding real-world intelligence to apps by connecting them to Knowledge and Search APIs.By the end of this book, you will be in a position to understand what Microsoft Cognitive Service can offer and how to use the different APIs.

278
Ebook

Keras Reinforcement Learning Projects. 9 projects exploring popular reinforcement learning techniques to build self-learning agents

Giuseppe Ciaburro

Reinforcement learning has evolved a lot in the last couple of years and proven to be a successful technique in building smart and intelligent AI networks. Keras Reinforcement Learning Projects installs human-level performance into your applications using algorithms and techniques of reinforcement learning, coupled with Keras, a faster experimental library.The book begins with getting you up and running with the concepts of reinforcement learning using Keras. You’ll learn how to simulate a random walk using Markov chains and select the best portfolio using dynamic programming (DP) and Python. You’ll also explore projects such as forecasting stock prices using Monte Carlo methods, delivering vehicle routing application using Temporal Distance (TD) learning algorithms, and balancing a Rotating Mechanical System using Markov decision processes.Once you’ve understood the basics, you’ll move on to Modeling of a Segway, running a robot control system using deep reinforcement learning, and building a handwritten digit recognition model in Python using an image dataset. Finally, you’ll excel in playing the board game Go with the help of Q-Learning and reinforcement learning algorithms.By the end of this book, you’ll not only have developed hands-on training on concepts, algorithms, and techniques of reinforcement learning but also be all set to explore the world of AI.

279
Ebook

Ethereum Projects for Beginners. Build blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and DApps

Kenny Vaneetvelde

Ethereum enables the development of efficient, smart contracts that contain code. These smart contracts can interact with other smart contracts to make decisions, store data, and send Ether to others.Ethereum Projects for Beginners provides you with a clear introduction to creating cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and decentralized applications. As you make your way through the book, you’ll get to grips with detailed step-by-step processes to build advanced Ethereum projects. Each project will teach you enough about Ethereum to be productive right away. You will learn how tokenization works, think in a decentralized way, and build blockchain-based distributed computing systems. Towards the end of the book, you will develop interesting Ethereum projects such as creating wallets and secure data sharing.By the end of this book, you will be able to tackle blockchain challenges by implementing end-to-end projects using the full power of the Ethereum blockchain.

280
Ebook

R Web Scraping Quick Start Guide. Techniques and tools to crawl and scrape data from websites

Olgun Aydin

Web scraping is a technique to extract data from websites. It simulates the behavior of a website user to turn the website itself into a web service to retrieve or introduce new data. This book gives you all you need to get started with scraping web pages using R programming.You will learn about the rules of RegEx and Xpath, key components for scraping website data. We will show you web scraping techniques, methodologies, and frameworks. With this book's guidance, you will become comfortable with the tools to write and test RegEx and XPath rules. We will focus on examples of dynamic websites for scraping data and how to implement the techniques learned. You will learn how to collect URLs and then create XPath rules for your first web scraping script using rvest library. From the data you collect, you will be able to calculate the statistics and create R plots to visualize them. Finally, you will discover how to use Selenium drivers with R for more sophisticated scraping. You will create AWS instances and use R to connect a PostgreSQL database hosted on AWS. By the end of the book, you will be sufficiently confident to create end-to-end web scraping systems using R.