Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents. A practical guide to building intelligent chatbots with Microsoft Power Platform

Nicolae Tarla

Power Virtual Agents is a set of technologies released under the Power Platform umbrella by Microsoft. It allows non-developers to create solutions to automate customer interactions and provide services using a conversational interface, thus relieving the pressure on front-line staff providing this kind of support.Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents is a guide to building chatbots that can be deployed to handle front desk services without having to write code. The book takes a scenario-based approach to implementing bot services and automation to serve employees in the organization and external customers. You will uncover the features available in Power Virtual Agents for creating bots that can be integrated into an organization’s public site as well as specific web pages. Next, you will understand how to build bots and integrate them within the Teams environment for internal users. As you progress, you will explore complete examples for implementing automated agents (bots) that can be deployed on sites for interacting with external customers.By the end of this Power Virtual Agents chatbot book, you will have implemented several scenarios to serve external client requests for information, created scenarios to help internal users retrieve relevant information, and processed these in an automated conversational manner.

Procedural Content Generation for Unity Game Development. Harness the power of procedural content generation to design unique games with Unity

Ryan Watkins

Procedural Content Generation is a process by which game content is developed using computer algorithms, rather than through the manual efforts of game developers. This book teaches readers how to develop algorithms for procedural generation that they can use in their own games. These concepts are put into practice using C# and Unity is used as the game development engine.This book provides the fundamentals of learning and continued learning using PCG. You'll discover the theory of PCG and the mighty Pseudo Random Number Generator. Random numbers such as die rolls and card drafting provide the chance factor that makes games fun and supplies spontaneity. This book also takes you through the full development of a 2D game. Starting with level generation, you'll learn how PCG can make the game environment for you. You'll move into item generation and learn the different techniques to procedurally create game items. Thereafter, you'll be guided through the more abstract PCG areas such as scaling difficulty to the player and even generating music! The book helps you set up systems within your games where algorithms create computationally generated levels, art assets, quests, stories, characters, and weapons; these can substantially reduce the burden of manually creating every aspect of the game.Finally, you'll get to try out your new PCG skills on 3D terrain generation.

Scalable Data Streaming with Amazon Kinesis. Design and secure highly available, cost-effective data streaming applications with Amazon Kinesis

Tarik Makota, Brian Maguire, Danny Gagne, Rajeev Chakrabarti

Amazon Kinesis is a collection of secure, serverless, durable, and highly available purpose-built data streaming services. This data streaming service provides APIs and client SDKs that enable you to produce and consume data at scale.Scalable Data Streaming with Amazon Kinesis begins with a quick overview of the core concepts of data streams, along with the essentials of the AWS Kinesis landscape. You'll then explore the requirements of the use case shown through the book to help you get started and cover the key pain points encountered in the data stream life cycle. As you advance, you'll get to grips with the architectural components of Kinesis, understand how they are configured to build data pipelines, and delve into the applications that connect to them for consumption and processing. You'll also build a Kinesis data pipeline from scratch and learn how to implement and apply practical solutions. Moving on, you'll learn how to configure Kinesis on a cloud platform. Finally, you’ll learn how other AWS services can be integrated into Kinesis. These services include Redshift, Dynamo Database, AWS S3, Elastic Search, and third-party applications such as Splunk.By the end of this AWS book, you’ll be able to build and deploy your own Kinesis data pipelines with Kinesis Data Streams (KDS), Kinesis Data Firehose (KFH), Kinesis Video Streams (KVS), and Kinesis Data Analytics (KDA).

Mastering JavaScript. Explore and master modern JavaScript techniques in order to build large-scale web applications

Ved Antani

JavaScript is a high-level, dynamic, untyped, lightweight, and interpreted programming language. Along with HTML and CSS, it is one of the three essential technologies of World Wide Web content production, and is an open source and cross-platform technology. The majority of websites employ JavaScript, and it is well supported by all modern web browsers without plugins. However, the JavaScript landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, and you need to adapt to the new world of JavaScript that people now expect. Mastering modern JavaScript techniques and the toolchain are essential to develop web-scale applications. Mastering JavaScript will be your companion as you master JavaScript and build innovative web applications. To begin with, you will get familiarized with the language constructs and how to make code easy to organize. You will gain a concrete understanding of variable scoping, loops, and best practices on using types and data structures, as well as the coding style and recommended code organization patterns in JavaScript. The book will also teach you how to use arrays and objects as data structures. You will graduate from intermediate-level skills to advanced techniques as you come to understand crucial language concepts and design principles. You will learn about modern libraries and tools so you can write better code. By the end of the book, you will understand how reactive JavaScript is going to be the new paradigm.

Working Smarter with Microsoft Outlook. Supercharge your office and personal productivity with expert Outlook tips and techniques

Millions of users across the globe spend their working hours using Microsoft Outlook to manage tasks, schedules, emails, and more. Post-pandemic, many organizations have started adopting remote working, and the need to stay productive in workspace collaboration has been increasing.Working Smarter with Microsoft Outlook takes you through smart techniques, tips, and productivity hacks that will help you become an expert Outlook user. This book brings together everything you need to know about automating your daily repetitive tasks. You’ll gain the skills necessary for working with calendars, contacts, notes, and tasks, and using them to collaborate with Microsoft SharePoint, OneNote, and many other services. You’ll learn how to use powerful tools such as Quick Steps, customized Rules, and Mail Merge with Power Automate for added functionality. Later, the book covers how to use Outlook for sharing information between Microsoft Exchange and cloud services. Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll get an introduction to Outlook programming by creating macros and seeing how you can integrate it within Outlook.By the end of this Microsoft Outlook book, you’ll be able to use Outlook and its features and capabilities efficiently to enhance your workspace collaboration and time management.

Learning Hadoop 2. Design and implement data processing, lifecycle management, and analytic workflows with the cutting-edge toolbox of Hadoop 2

Gerald Turkington, GABRIELE MODENA

Python for Google App Engine. Master the full range of development features provided by Google App Engine to build and run scalable web applications in Python

Massimiliano Pippi

ElasticSearch Cookbook. Over 130 advanced recipes to search, analyze, deploy, manage, and monitor data effectively with ElasticSearch

Alberto Paro