Principles of Strategic Data Science. Creating value from data, big and small

Peter Prevos

Mathematics and computer science form an integral part of data science, and understanding them is crucial for efficiently managing data. This book is designed to take you through the entire data science pipeline and help you join the dots between mathematics, programming, and business analysis. You’ll start by learning what data science is and how organizations can use it to revolutionize the way they use their data. The book then covers the criteria for the soundness of data products and demonstrates how to effectively visualize information. As you progress, you’ll discover the strategic aspects of data science by exploring the five-phase framework that enables you to enhance the value you extract from data. Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll understand the role of a data science manager in helping an organization take the data-driven approach.By the end of this book, you’ll have a good understanding of data science and how it can enable you to extract value from your data.

Android Studio Cookbook. Design, test, and debug your apps using Android Studio

Mike van Drongelen

This book starts with an introduction of Android Studio and why you should use this IDE rather than Eclipse. Moving ahead, it teaches you to build a simple app that requires no backend setup but uses Google Cloud or Parse instead. After that, you will learn how to create an Android app that can send and receive text and images using Google Cloud or Parse as a backend. It explains the concepts of Material design and how to apply them to an Android app. Also, it shows you how to build an app that runs on an Android wear device.Later, it explains how to build an app that takes advantage of the latest Android SDK while still supporting older Android versions. It also demonstrates how the performance of an app can be improved and how memory management tools that come with the Android Studio IDE can help you achieve this.By the end of the book, you will be able to develop high quality apps with a minimum amount of effort using the Android Studio IDE.

Getting Started with Unity 2018. A Beginner's Guide to 2D and 3D game development with Unity - Third Edition

Dr. Edward Lavieri

The Unity game engine has revolutionized the gaming industry with its complete set of intuitive tools and rapid workflows, which can be used to create interactive 3D content. With Unity, you can scaffold your way from the basics and make make stunning interactive games. This book will guide you through the entire process of creating a 3D game, from downloading the Unity game engine to publishing your game. It not only gives you a strong foundation, but puts you on the path to game development. Beginning with an overview of the Unity engine and its interface, you will walk through the process of creating a game environment and learn how to use built-in assets, as well as assets created with third-party 3D modeling tools such as Blender. Moving on, you will create custom scripts to control non-player character behaviors and gameplay. You will master exciting concepts such as Heads-Up-Displays, mini-maps, game navigation, sound effects, and lighting effects. Next, you’ll learn how to create your first VR experience, right from setting up the project to image effects. You'll be familiarized with all the tools that Unity has to offer to create your own immersive VR experiences. Each section is a stepping stone toward the completion of the final game. By the end of the book, you'll have learned advanced topics such as cross-platform considerations which enable your games to run on multiple platforms.

Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP. Make your legacy applications organized, testable and free of globals

Paul Jones

Have you noticed that your legacy PHP application is composed of page scripts placed directly in the document root of the web server? Or, do your page scripts, along with any other classes and functions, combine the concerns of model, view, and controller into the same scope? Is the majority of the logical flow incorporated as include files and global functions rather than class methods? Working with such a legacy application feels like dragging your feet through mud, doesn’t it?This book will show you how to modernize your application in terms of practice and technique, rather than in terms of using tools such as frameworks and libraries, by extracting and replacing its legacy artifacts. We will use a step-by-step approach, moving slowly and methodically, to improve your application from the ground up. We’ll show you how dependency injection can replace both the new and global dependencies. We’ll also show you how to change the presentation logic to view files and the action logic to a controller. Moreover, we’ll keep your application running the whole time. Each completed step in the process will keep your codebase fully operational with higher quality. When we are done, you will be able to breeze through your code like the wind. Your code will be autoloaded, dependency-injected, unit-tested, layer-separated, and front-controlled. Most of the very limited code we will add to your application is specific to this book. We will be improving ourselves as programmers, as well as improving the quality of our legacy application.

Building Business-Ready Generative AI Systems. Build Human-Centered Generative AI Systems with Agents, Memory, and LLMs for Enterprise

Denis Rothman

In today's rapidly evolving AI landscape, standalone LLMs no longer deliver sufficient business value on their own. This guide moves beyond basic chatbots, showing you how to build advanced, agentic ChatGPT-grade systems capable of sophisticated semantic and sentiment analysis, powered by context-aware AI controllers. You'll design AI controller architectures with multi-user memory retention to dynamically adapt your system to diverse user and system inputs. You'll architect a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system with Pinecone, designed to combine instruction-driven scenarios. Enhance your system’s intelligence with powerful multimodal capabilities—including image generation, voice interactions, and machine-driven reasoning—leveraging Chain-of-Thought orchestration to address complex, cross-domain automation challenges. Seamlessly integrate generative models like OpenAI’s suite and DeepSeek-R1 without disrupting your existing GenAISys ecosystem. Your GenAISys will apply neuroscience-inspired insights to marketing strategies, predict human mobility, integrate smoothly into human workflows, visualize complex scenarios, and connect to live external data, all wrapped in a polished, investor-ready interface. By the end, you'll have built a GenAISys capable of deploying intelligent agents in your business environment.

Quick Start Kubernetes. A Beginner's Guide to Container Orchestration in the Cloud - Third Edition

Nigel Poulton

This book is the backbone of modern cloud-native application deployment, but its complexity can be daunting for beginners. This book provides a practical and approachable guide to mastering Kubernetes, starting with fundamental concepts like microservices, orchestration, and cloud-native development. Readers will explore Kubernetes architecture, including control planes, worker nodes, and hosted solutions.Step-by-step instructions guide readers through setting up Kubernetes clusters on local and cloud platforms, containerizing applications, and pushing images to registries. Learn how to deploy containerized applications, connect them via services, and enable self-healing to ensure resilience.As you advance, discover how to scale applications dynamically, perform rolling updates for zero-downtime deployments, and troubleshoot real-world issues. The book concludes with resources for further learning, empowering readers to confidently manage Kubernetes environments in DevOps or cloud-native roles. Perfect for beginners, this hands-on guide simplifies Kubernetes for practical use.

Cloud Security Handbook. Effectively secure cloud environments using AWS, Azure, and GCP - Second Edition

Eyal Estrin

Securing cloud resources is no easy task—each provider has its unique set of tools, processes, and challenges, demanding specialized expertise. This book cuts through the complexity, delivering practical guidance on embedding security best practices across the core infrastructure components of AWS, Azure, and GCP. It equips information security professionals and cloud engineers with the skills to identify risks and implement robust security controls throughout the design, deployment, and maintenance of public cloud environments.Starting with the shared responsibility model, cloud service models, and deployment models, this book helps you get to grips with fundamental concepts such as compute, storage, networking, identity management, and encryption. You’ll then explore common threats and compliance requirements for cloud environments. As you progress, you'll implement security strategies across deployments ranging from small-scale environments to enterprise-grade production systems, including hybrid and multi-cloud setups.This edition expands on emerging topics like GenAI service security and DevSecOps, with hands-on examples leveraging built-in security features of AWS, Azure, and GCP.By the end of this book, you'll confidently secure any cloud environment with a comprehensive understanding of cloud security principles.

The Salesforce Business Analyst Handbook. Proven business analysis techniques and processes for a superior user experience and adoption

Srini Munagavalasa

Salesforce business analysis skills are in high demand, and there are scant resources to satisfy this demand. This practical guide for business analysts contains all the tools, techniques, and processes needed to create business value and improve user adoption.The Salesforce Business Analyst Handbook begins with the most crucial element of any business analysis activity: identifying business requirements. You’ll learn how to use tacit business analysis and Salesforce system analysis skills to rank and stack all requirements as well as get buy-in from stakeholders. Once you understand the requirements, you’ll work on transforming them into working software via prototyping, mockups, and wireframing. But what good is a product if the customer cannot use it? To help you achieve that, this book will discuss various testing strategies and show you how to tailor testing scenarios that align with business requirements documents. Toward the end, you’ll find out how to create easy-to-use training material for your customers and focus on post-production support – one of the most critical phases. Your customers will stay with you if you support them when they need it!By the end of this Salesforce book, you’ll be able to successfully navigate every phase of a project and confidently apply your new knowledge in your own Salesforce implementations.