Designing and Prototyping Interfaces with Figma. Learn essential UX/UI design principles by creating interactive prototypes for mobile, tablet, and desktop

Fabio Staiano

A driving force of the design tools market, Figma makes it easy to work with classic design features while enabling unique innovations and opening up real-time collaboration possibilities. It comes as no surprise that many designers decide to switch from other tools to Figma.In this book, you'll be challenged to design a user interface for a responsive mobile application having researched and understood user needs. You'll become well-versed with the process in a step-by-step manner by exploring the theory first and gradually moving on to practice. You'll begin your learning journey by covering the basics of user experience research with FigJam and the process of creating a complete design using Figma tools such as Components, Variants, Auto Layout, and much more. You'll also learn how to prototype your design and explore the potential of community resources such as templates and plugins.By the end of this Figma book, you'll have a solid understanding of the user interface workflow, managing essential Figma tools, and organizing your workflow.

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook. Master the art of Shader programming to bring life to your Unity projects

Alan Zucconi

Since their introduction to Unity, Shaders have been notoriously difficult to understand and implement in games: complex mathematics have always stood in the way of creating your own Shaders and attaining that level of realism you crave. With Shaders, you can transform your game into a highly polished, refined product with Unity’s post-processing effects.Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook is the first of its kind to bring you the secrets of creating Shaders for Unity3D—guiding you through the process of understanding vectors, how lighting is constructed with them, and also how textures are used to create complex effects without the heavy math.We’ll start with essential lighting and finishing up by creating stunning screen Effects just like those in high quality 3D and mobile games. You’ll discover techniques including normal mapping, image-based lighting, and how to animate your models inside a Shader. We’ll explore the secrets behind some of the most powerful techniques, such as physically based rendering! With Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook, what seems like a dark art today will be second nature by tomorrow.

Blender 3D Incredible Machines. Design, model, and texture complex mechanical objects in Blender

Christopher Kuhn, Allan Brito

Blender 3D is one of the top pieces of 3D animation software. Machine modeling is an essential aspect of war games, space games, racing games, and animated action films. As the Blender software grows more powerful and popular, there is a demand to take your modeling skills to the next level. This book will cover all the topics you need to create professional models and renders. This book will help you develop a comprehensive skill set that covers the key aspects of mechanical modeling. Through this book, you will create many types of projects, including a pistol, spacecraft, robot, and a racer. We start by making a Sci-fi pistol, creating its basic shape and adding details to it. Moving on, you’ll discover modeling techniques for larger objects such as a space craft and take a look at how different techniques are required for freestyle modeling. After this, we’ll create the basic shapes for the robot and combine the meshes to create unified objects. We'll assign materials and explore the various options for freestyle rendering. We’ll discuss techniques to build low-poly models, create a low-poly racer, and explain how they differ from the high poly models we created previously. By the end of this book, you will have mastered a workflow that you will be able to apply to your own creations.

Engineering Data Mesh in Azure Cloud. Implement data mesh using Microsoft Azure's Cloud Adoption Framework

Aniruddha Deswandikar

Decentralizing data and centralizing governance are practical, scalable, and modern approaches to data analytics. However, implementing a data mesh can feel like changing the engine of a moving car. Most organizations struggle to start and get caught up in the concept of data domains, spending months trying to organize domains. This is where Engineering Data Mesh in Azure Cloud can help.The book starts by assessing your existing framework before helping you architect a practical design. As you progress, you’ll focus on the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure and the cloud-scale analytics framework, which will help you quickly set up a landing zone for your data mesh in the cloud.The book also resolves common challenges related to the adoption and implementation of a data mesh faced by real customers. It touches on the concepts of data contracts and helps you build practical data contracts that work for your organization. The last part of the book covers some common architecture patterns used for modern analytics frameworks such as artificial intelligence (AI).By the end of this book, you’ll be able to transform existing analytics frameworks into a streamlined data mesh using Microsoft Azure, thereby navigating challenges and implementing advanced architecture patterns for modern analytics workloads.

Mastering Customer Success. Discover tactics to decrease churn and expand revenue

Jeff Mar, Peter Armaly, Mark Stouse

The rapidly evolving customer success landscape has left many Customer Success Managers (CSMs) struggling to keep pace with the complexities of this dynamic role. This Customer Success book bridges the gap by providing a comprehensive framework for mastering the essential skills required to excel.You’ll find out why the Customer Success function is indispensable today and gain expert insights into account segmentation, financial tiering, ideal customer profiles, and the complexity of customer engagement process design. You’ll then delve into playbook development, where you’ll find practical guidance for CSMs and Customer Success Operations Managers who want to improve their ability to drive desired business outcomes. Through insightful case studies, the authors illustrate their own experience of successful Customer Success implementation, showing you what it takes to exceed customer expectations with well-designed, proactive services. The journey doesn’t end there—it extends to highlighting the resilience required to build and operate successful Customer Success organizations.By the end of this guide, you’ll be equipped with the tactics and mindset necessary to stand out as a world-class Customer Success leader in your organization, driving growth at every turn.

Pragmatic Microservices with C# and Azure. Build, deploy, and scale microservices efficiently to meet modern software demands

Christian Nagel

Pragmatic Microservices with C# and Azure introduces .NET Aspire for microservices, focusing on defining an app model, utilizing service discovery, and integrating with Azure's native cloud services. Written by a Microsoft MVP and seasoned software architect with over two decades of experience in .NET, this book will help you get to grips with robust service development using .NET features like minimal APIs, gRPC, and SignalR for real-time communication. Aside from covering essential aspects of DevOps, including testing methodologies such as unit, integration, and load testing, you’ll also explore logging and monitoring including OpenTelemetry using tools like Azure Log Analytics, Application Insights, Prometheus, and Grafana. You'll learn about asynchronous communication leveraging queues and events through Azure Event Hub and Apache. Throughout the book, theoretical aspects will be complemented by practical skills gained from building and deploying a fully functional microservices-based application. By the end, you’ll possess a deep understanding of microservices architecture, hands-on experience with various .NET technologies and Azure services, and the ability to design, build, deploy, and manage microservices applications effectively in both on-premises and cloud environments.

40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know. Hone your problem-solving skills by learning different algorithms and their implementation in Python

Imran Ahmad

Algorithms have always played an important role in both the science and practice of computing. Beyond traditional computing, the ability to use algorithms to solve real-world problems is an important skill that any developer or programmer must have. This book will help you not only to develop the skills to select and use an algorithm to solve real-world problems but also to understand how it works.You’ll start with an introduction to algorithms and discover various algorithm design techniques, before exploring how to implement different types of algorithms, such as searching and sorting, with the help of practical examples. As you advance to a more complex set of algorithms, you'll learn about linear programming, page ranking, and graphs, and even work with machine learning algorithms, understanding the math and logic behind them. Further on, case studies such as weather prediction, tweet clustering, and movie recommendation engines will show you how to apply these algorithms optimally. Finally, you’ll become well versed in techniques that enable parallel processing, giving you the ability to use these algorithms for compute-intensive tasks.By the end of this book, you'll have become adept at solving real-world computational problems by using a wide range of algorithms.

The Road to Azure Cost Governance. Techniques to tame your monthly Azure bill with a continuous optimization journey for your apps

Paola E. Annis, Giuliano Caglio, Marco Barra Caracciolo

Cloud teams and ICT cost controllers working with Azure will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide, introducing a process model for structured cost governance. The Road to Azure Cost Governance is a must-read if you find yourself facing the harsh reality of monthly cloud costs gradually getting out of control.Starting with how resources are created and managed, everything you need to know in order to track, display, optimize, rightsize, and clean up cloud resources will be tackled with a workflow approach that will leave the choice of operation to you (be it the Azure CLI, automation, logic apps, or even custom code). Using real-world datasets, you'll learn everything from basic cost management to modeling your cloud spend across your technical resources in a sustainable way. The book will also show you how to create a recursive optimization process that will give you full control of spending and savings, while helping you reserve budget for future cloud projects and innovation.By the end of this Azure book, you'll have a clear understanding and control of your cloud spend along with knowledge of a number of cost-saving techniques used by companies around the world, application optimization patterns, and the carbon impact of your cloud infrastructure.