FinOps Handbook for Microsoft Azure. Empowering teams to optimize their Azure cloud spend with FinOps best practices

Maulik Soni

To gain a competitive edge in today's unpredictable economic climate, you’ll need to unravel the mystery of saving costs on Microsoft Azure Cloud. This book helps you do just that with proven strategies for building, running, and sustaining repeated cost optimization initiatives across your organization. You’ll learn how to collaborate with finance, procurement, product, and engineering teams to optimize your cloud spend and achieve cost savings that can make a significant impact on your bottom line.The book begins by showing you how to effectively monitor and manage your cloud usage, identify cost-saving opportunities, and implement changes that’ll reduce your overall spend. Whether you're a small start-up or a large enterprise, this book will equip you with the knowledge and skills needed to achieve cost savings and maintain a lean cloud infrastructure. As you advance, you'll find out how to benchmark your current cloud spend and establish a budget for cloud usage. Throughout the chapters, you’ll learn how to negotiate with your cloud provider to optimize your rate, allocate cost for the container, and gain a solid understanding of metric-driven cost optimization.By the end of this FinOps book, you’ll have become proficient in Azure Cloud financial management with the help of real-world examples, use cases, and scenarios.

Learning Predictive Analytics with R. Get to grips with key data visualization and predictive analytic skills using R

Eric Mayor

This book is packed with easy-to-follow guidelines that explain the workings of the many key data mining tools of R, which are used to discover knowledge from your data.You will learn how to perform key predictive analytics tasks using R, such as train and test predictive models for classification and regression tasks, score new data sets and so on. All chapters will guide you in acquiring the skills in a practical way. Most chapters also include a theoretical introduction that will sharpen your understanding of the subject matter and invite you to go further.The book familiarizes you with the most common data mining tools of R, such as k-means, hierarchical regression, linear regression, association rules, principal component analysis, multilevel modeling, k-NN, Naïve Bayes, decision trees, and text mining. It also provides a description of visualization techniques using the basic visualization tools of R as well as lattice for visualizing patterns in data organized in groups. This book is invaluable for anyone fascinated by the data mining opportunities offered by GNU R and its packages.

Vector Search for Practitioners with Elastic. A toolkit for building NLP solutions for search, observability, and security using vector search

Bahaaldine Azarmi, Jeff Vestal, Shay Banon

While natural language processing (NLP) is largely used in search use cases, this book aims to inspire you to start using vectors to overcome equally important domain challenges like observability and cybersecurity. The chapters focus mainly on integrating vector search with Elastic to enhance not only their search but also observability and cybersecurity capabilities.The book, which also features a foreword written by the founder of Elastic, begins by teaching you about NLP and the functionality of Elastic in NLP processes. Here you’ll delve into resource requirements and find out how vectors are stored in the dense-vector type along with specific page cache requirements for fast response times. As you advance, you’ll discover various tuning techniques and strategies to improve machine learning model deployment, including node scaling, configuration tuning, and load testing with Rally and Python. You’ll also cover techniques for vector search with images, fine-tuning models for improved performance, and the use of clip models for image similarity search in Elasticsearch. Finally, you’ll explore retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and learn to integrate ChatGPT with Elasticsearch to leverage vectorized data, ELSER's capabilities, and RRF's refined search mechanism.By the end of this NLP book, you’ll have all the necessary skills needed to implement and optimize vector search in your projects with Elastic.

Mastering Unity Game Development with C#. Harness the full potential of Unity 2022 game development using C#

Mohamed Essam

Do you want to level up your Unity game development skills? Then look no further! This book is your one-stop solution to creating mesmerizing games with lifelike features and captivating gameplay.Written by a highly experienced Unity developer, this book emphasizes project organization, clean C# code, and Unity plugins, including the new Input System and Cinemachine. Mastering Unity Game Development with C# shows you how to structure projects effectively, write clean and modular code, utilize the power of Unity plugins, and design engaging game mechanics. You’ll also understand how to optimize user interfaces for a seamless player experience, manage game data efficiently, contribute to existing code bases, integrate third-party assets and APIs, and apply optimization techniques to enhance game performance.By the end of this book, you’ll have acquired the knowledge and skills that will empower you to create efficient and engaging games.

Getting Started with SketchUp Pro. Embark on your 3D modeling adventure with expert tips, tricks, and best practices

David S. Sellers

Owing to its ability to create models quickly and with high level of dimensional accuracy, SketchUp Pro has become a popular choice for many industries, including architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, and video game design. If you are seeking to adopt Trimble's exceptional design software, Getting Started with SketchUp Pro serves as an ideal primer to prepare and equip you for its use.This book will help you lay the foundation of a project from scratch, set up appropriate units, and follow a guided path to structure your 3D models. You’ll explore the workflows used for creating designs from sketches, making CAD drawings (DWG), and even updating your existing 3D models. Finally, you’ll work with extensions and 3D Warehouse to find new workflows and models to add to your skill set.By the end of this SketchUp book, you’ll be able to confidently create and share models of your design through CAD drawings and 3D views, and even take them online through the 3D Warehouse

Practical Memory Forensics. Jumpstart effective forensic analysis of volatile memory

Svetlana Ostrovskaya, Oleg Skulkin

Memory Forensics is a powerful analysis technique that can be used in different areas, from incident response to malware analysis. With memory forensics, you can not only gain key insights into the user's context but also look for unique traces of malware, in some cases, to piece together the puzzle of a sophisticated targeted attack.Starting with an introduction to memory forensics, this book will gradually take you through more modern concepts of hunting and investigating advanced malware using free tools and memory analysis frameworks. This book takes a practical approach and uses memory images from real incidents to help you gain a better understanding of the subject and develop the skills required to investigate and respond to malware-related incidents and complex targeted attacks. You'll cover Windows, Linux, and macOS internals and explore techniques and tools to detect, investigate, and hunt threats using memory forensics. Equipped with this knowledge, you'll be able to create and analyze memory dumps on your own, examine user activity, detect traces of fileless and memory-based malware, and reconstruct the actions taken by threat actors.By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed in memory forensics and have gained hands-on experience of using various tools associated with it.

KnockoutJS Essentials. Implement a successful JavaScript-rich application with KnockoutJS, jQuery, and Bootstrap

Jorge Ferrando, Jorge F Ferrando

Fundamentals of Analytics Engineering. An introduction to building end-to-end analytics solutions

Dumky De Wilde, Fanny Kassapian, Jovan Gligorevic, Juan Manuel Perafan, ...

Written by a team of 7 industry experts, Fundamentals of Analytics Engineering will introduce you to everything from foundational concepts to advanced skills to get started as an analytics engineer.After conquering data ingestion and techniques for data quality and scalability, you’ll learn about techniques such as data cleaning transformation, data modeling, SQL query optimization and reuse, and serving data across different platforms. Armed with this knowledge, you will implement a simple data platform from ingestion to visualization, using tools like Airbyte Cloud, Google BigQuery, dbt, and Tableau. You’ll also get to grips with strategies for data integrity with a focus on data quality and observability, along with collaborative coding practices like version control with Git. You’ll learn about advanced principles like CI/CD, automating workflows, gathering, scoping, and documenting business requirements, as well as data governance.By the end of this book, you’ll be armed with the essential techniques and best practices for developing scalable analytics solutions from end to end.