Mastering UI Development with Unity. An in-depth guide to developing engaging user interfaces with Unity 5, Unity 2017, and Unity 2018

Ashley Godbold

A functional UI is an important component for player interaction in every type of video game. Along with imparting crucial statistical information to the player, the UI is also the window through which the player engages with the world established by the game. Unity's tools give you the opportunity to create complex and attractive UIs to make your game stand out.This book helps you realize the full potential of Unity's powerful tools to create the best UI for your games by walking you through the creation of myriad user interface components.Learn how to create visually engaging heads-up-displays, pause menus, health bars, circular progress bars, animated menus, and more. This book not only teaches how to lay out visual elements, but also how to program these features and implement them across multiple games of varying genres.While working through the examples provided, you will learn how to develop a UI that scales to multiple screen resolutions, so your game can be released on multiple platforms with minimal changes.

Big Data Analytics with Hadoop 3. Build highly effective analytics solutions to gain valuable insight into your big data

Sridhar Alla

Apache Hadoop is the most popular platform for big data processing, and can be combined with a host of other big data tools to build powerful analytics solutions. Big Data Analytics with Hadoop 3 shows you how to do just that, by providing insights into the software as well as its benefits with the help of practical examples.Once you have taken a tour of Hadoop 3’s latest features, you will get an overview of HDFS, MapReduce, and YARN, and how they enable faster, more efficient big data processing. You will then move on to learning how to integrate Hadoop with the open source tools, such as Python and R, to analyze and visualize data and perform statistical computing on big data. As you get acquainted with all this, you will explore how to use Hadoop 3 with Apache Spark and Apache Flink for real-time data analytics and stream processing. In addition to this, you will understand how to use Hadoop to build analytics solutions on the cloud and an end-to-end pipeline to perform big data analysis using practical use cases.By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with the analytical capabilities of the Hadoop ecosystem. You will be able to build powerful solutions to perform big data analytics and get insight effortlessly.

Python Web Scraping. Hands-on data scraping and crawling using PyQT, Selnium, HTML and Python - Second Edition

Katharine Jarmul

The Internet contains the most useful set of data ever assembled, most of which is publicly accessible for free. However, this data is not easily usable. It is embedded within the structure and style of websites and needs to be carefully extracted. Web scraping is becoming increasingly useful as a means to gather and make sense of the wealth of information available online.This book is the ultimate guide to using the latest features of Python 3.x to scrape data from websites. In the early chapters, you'll see how to extract data from static web pages. You'll learn to use caching with databases and files to save time and manage the load on servers. Aftercovering the basics, you'll get hands-on practice building a more sophisticated crawler using browsers, crawlers, and concurrent scrapers.You'll determine when and how to scrape data from a JavaScript-dependent website using PyQt and Selenium. You'll get a better understanding of how to submit forms on complex websites protected by CAPTCHA. You'll find out how to automate these actions with Python packages such as mechanize. You'll also learn how to create class-based scrapers with Scrapy libraries and implement your learning on real websites.By the end of the book, you will have explored testing websites with scrapers, remote scraping, best practices, working with images, and many other relevant topics.

Practical Game AI Programming. Unleash the power of Artificial Intelligence to your game

Micael DaGraça

The book starts with the basics examples of AI for different game genres and directly jumps into defining the probabilities and possibilities of the AI character to determine character movement. Next, you’ll learn how AI characters should behave within the environment created.Moving on, you’ll explore how to work with animations. You’ll also plan and create pruning strategies, and create Theta algorithms to find short and realistic looking game paths. Next, you’ll learn how the AI should behave when there is a lot of characters in the same scene.You'll explore which methods and algorithms, such as possibility maps, Forward Chaining Plan, Rete Algorithm, Pruning Strategies, Wall Distances, and Map Preprocess Implementation should be used on different occasions. You’ll discover how to overcome some limitations, and how to deliver a better experience to the player. By the end of the book, you think differently about AI.

Effective Business Intelligence with QuickSight. Boost your business IQ with Amazon QuickSight

Rajesh Nadipalli

Amazon QuickSight is the next-generation Business Intelligence (BI) cloud service that can help you build interactive visualizations on top of various data sources hosted on Amazon Cloud Infrastructure. QuickSight delivers responsive insights into big data and enables organizations to quickly democratize data visualizations and scale to hundreds of users at a fraction of the cost when compared to traditional BI tools.This book begins with an introduction to Amazon QuickSight, feature differentiators from traditional BI tools, and how it fits in the overall AWS big data ecosystem. With practical examples, you will find tips and techniques to load your data to AWS, prepare it, and finally visualize it using QuickSight. You will learn how to build interactive charts, reports, dashboards, and stories using QuickSight and share with others using just your browser and mobile app.The book also provides a blueprint to build a real-life big data project on top of AWS Data Lake Solution and demonstrates how to build a modern data lake on the cloud with governance, data catalog, and analysis. It reviews the current product shortcomings, features in the roadmap, and how to provide feedback to AWS.Grow your profits, improve your products, and beat your competitors.

C# Data Structures and Algorithms. Explore the possibilities of C# for developing a variety of efficient applications

Marcin Jamro

Data structures allow organizing data efficiently. They are critical to various problems and their suitable implementation can provide a complete solution that acts like reusable code. In this book, you will learn how to use various data structures while developing in the C# language as well as how to implement some of the most common algorithms used with such data structures.At the beginning, you will get to know arrays, lists, dictionaries, and sets together with real-world examples of your application. Then, you will learn how to create and use stacks and queues. In the following part of the book, the more complex data structures will be introduced, namely trees and graphs, together with some algorithms for searching the shortest path in a graph. We will also discuss how to organize the code in a manageable, consistent, and extendable way. By the end of the book,you will learn how to build components that are easy to understand, debug, and use in different applications.

CompTIA Project+ Certification Guide. Learn project management best practices and successfully pass the CompTIA Project+ PK0-004 exam

J. Ashley Hunt

The CompTIA Project+ exam is designed for IT professionals who want to improve their career trajectory by gaining certification in project management specific to their industry. This guide covers everything necessary to pass the current iteration of the Project+ PK0-004 exam.The CompTIA Project+ Certification Guide starts by covering project initiation best practices, including an understanding of organizational structures, team roles, and responsibilities. You’ll then study best practices for developing a project charter and the scope of work to produce deliverables necessary to obtain formal approval of the end result. The ability to monitor your project work and make changes as necessary to bring performance back in line with the plan is the difference between a successful and unsuccessful project. The concluding chapters of the book provide best practices to help keep an eye on your projects and close them out successfully. The guide also includes practice questions created to mirror the exam experience and help solidify your understanding of core project management concepts.By the end of this book, you will be able to develop creative solutions for complex issues faced in project management.

Hands-On Red Team Tactics. A practical guide to mastering Red Team operations

Himanshu Sharma, Harpreet Singh

Red Teaming is used to enhance security by performing simulated attacks on an organization in order to detect network and system vulnerabilities. Hands-On Red Team Tactics starts with an overview of pentesting and Red Teaming, before giving you an introduction to few of the latest pentesting tools. We will then move on to exploring Metasploit and getting to grips with Armitage. Once you have studied the fundamentals, you will learn how to use Cobalt Strike and how to set up its team server.The book introduces some common lesser known techniques for pivoting and how to pivot over SSH, before using Cobalt Strike to pivot. This comprehensive guide demonstrates advanced methods of post-exploitation using Cobalt Strike and introduces you to Command and Control (C2) servers and redirectors. All this will help you achieve persistence using beacons and data exfiltration, and will also give you the chance to run through the methodology to use Red Team activity tools such as Empire during a Red Team activity on Active Directory and Domain Controller.In addition to this, you will explore maintaining persistent access, staying untraceable, and getting reverse connections over different C2 covert channels.By the end of this book, you will have learned about advanced penetration testing tools, techniques to get reverse shells over encrypted channels, and processes for post-exploitation.