Hands-On Blockchain with Hyperledger. Building decentralized applications with Hyperledger Fabric and Composer

Nitin Gaur, Luc Desrosiers, Venkatraman Ramakrishna, Petr Novotny, ...

Blockchain and Hyperledger technologies are hot topics today. Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Composer are open source projects that help organizations create private, permissioned blockchain networks. These find application in finance, banking, supply chain, and IoT among several other sectors. This book will be an easy reference to explore and build blockchain networks using Hyperledger technologies.The book starts by outlining the evolution of blockchain, including an overview of relevant blockchain technologies. You will learn how to configure Hyperledger Fabric and become familiar with its architectural components. Using these components, you will learn to build private blockchain networks, along with the applications that connect to them. Starting from principles first, you’ll learn to design and launch a network, implement smart contracts in chaincode and much more. By the end of this book, you will be able to build and deploy your own decentralized applications, handling the key pain points encountered in the blockchain life cycle.

Mastering SFML Game Development. Inject new life and light into your old SFML projects by advancing to the next level

Raimondas Pupius

SFML is a cross-platform software development library written in C++ with bindings available for many programming languages. It provides a simple interface to the various components of your PC, to ease the development of games and multimedia applications. This book will help you become an expert of SFML by using all of its features to its full potential. It begins by going over some of the foundational code necessary in order to make our RPG project run. By the end of chapter 3, we will have successfully picked up and deployed a fast and efficient particle system that makes the game look much more ‘alive’. Throughout the next couple of chapters, you will be successfully editing the game maps with ease, all thanks to the custom tools we’re going to be building. From this point on, it’s all about making the game look good. After being introduced to the use of shaders and raw OpenGL, you will be guided through implementing dynamic scene lighting, the use of normal and specular maps, and dynamic soft shadows. However, no project is complete without being optimized first. The very last chapter will wrap up our project by making it lightning fast and efficient.

Mastering Rust. Learn about memory safety, type system, concurrency, and the new features of Rust 2018 edition - Second Edition

Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta

Rust is an empowering language that provides a rare combination of safety, speed, and zero-cost abstractions. Mastering Rust – Second Edition is filled with clear and simple explanations of the language features along with real-world examples, showing you how you can build robust, scalable, and reliable programs. This second edition of the book improves upon the previous one and touches on all aspects that make Rust a great language. We have included the features from latest Rust 2018 edition such as the new module system, the smarter compiler, helpful error messages, and the stable procedural macros. You’ll learn how Rust can be used for systems programming, network programming, and even on the web. You’ll also learn techniques such as writing memory-safe code, building idiomatic Rust libraries, writing efficient asynchronous networking code, and advanced macros. The book contains a mix of theory and hands-on tasks so you acquire the skills as well as the knowledge, and it also provides exercises to hammer the concepts in. After reading this book, you will be able to implement Rust for your enterprise projects, write better tests and documentation, design for performance, and write idiomatic Rust code.

Kali Linux - An Ethical Hacker's Cookbook. End-to-end penetration testing solutions

Himanshu Sharma

With the current rate of hacking, it is very important to pentest your environment in order to ensure advanced-level security. This book is packed with practical recipes that will quickly get you started with Kali Linux (version 2016.2) according to your needs, and move on to core functionalities. This book will start with the installation and configuration of Kali Linux so that you can perform your tests. You will learn how to plan attack strategies and perform web application exploitation using tools such as Burp, and Jexboss. You will also learn how to perform network exploitation using Metasploit, Sparta, and Wireshark. Next, you will perform wireless and password attacks using tools such as Patator, John the Ripper, and airoscript-ng. Lastly, you will learn how to create an optimum quality pentest report! By the end of this book, you will know how to conduct advanced penetration testing thanks to the book’s crisp and task-oriented recipes.

Implementing Qlik Sense. Design, Develop, and Validate BI solutions for consultants

Kaushik Solanki, Ganapati Hegde

Qlik Sense is a leading platform for business intelligence (BI) solutions. Qlik Sense helps organizations in making informed decisions based on the data they have.This book will teach you how to effectively use Qlik for optimum customer satisfaction. You will undergo a metamorphosis from a developer to a consultant who is capable of building the most suitable BI solutions for your clients. The book will take you through several business cases – this will give you enough insight to understand the needs of the client clearly and build a BI solution that meets or exceeds their expectations. Starting from the pre-project activities, you will go to the actual execution of the project, the implementation, and even maintenance. This book will give you all the information you need - from the strategy to requirement gathering to implementing BI solutions using Qlik Sense. The book will empower you to take the right decisions in tricky and diffi cult situations while developing analytics and dashboards.

Hands-On Data Science for Marketing. Improve your marketing strategies with machine learning using Python and R

Yoon Hyup Hwang

Regardless of company size, the adoption of data science and machine learning for marketing has been rising in the industry. With this book, you will learn to implement data science techniques to understand the drivers behind the successes and failures of marketing campaigns. This book is a comprehensive guide to help you understand and predict customer behaviors and create more effectively targeted and personalized marketing strategies.This is a practical guide to performing simple-to-advanced tasks, to extract hidden insights from the data and use them to make smart business decisions. You will understand what drives sales and increases customer engagements for your products. You will learn to implement machine learning to forecast which customers are more likely to engage with the products and have high lifetime value. This book will also show you how to use machine learning techniques to understand different customer segments and recommend the right products for each customer. Apart from learning to gain insights into consumer behavior using exploratory analysis, you will also learn the concept of A/B testing and implement it using Python and R.By the end of this book, you will be experienced enough with various data science and machine learning techniques to run and manage successful marketing campaigns for your business.

Mastering Active Directory. Understand the Core Functionalities of Active Directory Services Using Microsoft Server 2016 and PowerShell

Dishan Francis

Active Directory is a centralized and standardized system that automates networked management of user data, security, and distributed resources and enables interoperation with other directories. If you are aware of Active Directory basics and want to gain expertise in it, this book is perfect for you. We will quickly go through the architecture and fundamentals of Active Directory and then dive deep into the core components, such as forests, domains, sites, trust relationships, OU, objects, attributes, DNS, and replication. We will then move on to AD schemas, global catalogs, LDAP, RODC, RMS, certificate authorities, group policies, and security best practices, which will help you gain a better understanding of objects and components and how they can be used effectively. We will also cover AD Domain Services and Federation Services for Windows Server 2016 and all their new features. Last but not least, you will learn how to manage your identity infrastructure for a hybrid-cloud setup. All this will help you design, plan, deploy, manage operations on, and troubleshoot your enterprise identity infrastructure in a secure, effective manner. Furthermore, I will guide you through automating administrative tasks using PowerShell cmdlets. Toward the end of the book, we will cover best practices and troubleshooting techniques that can be used to improve security and performance in an identity infrastructure.

Learning Concurrency in Python. Build highly efficient, robust, and concurrent applications

Elliot Forbes

Python is a very high level, general purpose language that is utilized heavily in fields such as data science and research, as well as being one of the top choices for general purpose programming for programmers around the world. It features a wide number of powerful, high and low-level libraries and frameworks that complement its delightful syntax and enable Python programmers to create.This book introduces some of the most popular libraries and frameworks and goes in-depth into how you can leverage these libraries for your own high-concurrent, highly-performant Python programs. We'll cover the fundamental concepts of concurrency needed to be able to write your own concurrent and parallel software systems in Python.The book will guide you down the path to mastering Python concurrency, giving you all the necessary hardware and theoretical knowledge. We'll cover concepts such as debugging and exception handling as well as some of the most popular libraries and frameworks that allow you to create event-driven and reactive systems.By the end of the book, you'll have learned the techniques to write incredibly efficient concurrent systems that follow best practices.