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.

Mastering PHP 7. Design, configure, build, and test professional web applications

Branko Ajzele

PHP is a server-side scripting language that is widely used for web development. With this book, you will get a deep understanding of the advanced programming concepts in PHP and how to apply it practicallyThe book starts by unveiling the new features of PHP 7 and walks you through several important standards set by PHP Framework Interop Group (PHP-FIG). You’ll see, in detail, the working of all magic methods, and the importance of effective PHP OOP concepts, which will enable you to write effective PHP code. You will find out how to implement design patterns and resolve dependencies to make your code base more elegant and readable. You will also build web services alongside microservices architecture, interact with databases, and work around third-party packages to enrich applications. This book delves into the details of PHP performance optimization. You will learn about serverless architecture and the reactive programming paradigm that found its way in the PHP ecosystem. The book also explores the best ways of testing your code, debugging, tracing, profiling, and deploying your PHP application. By the end of the book, you will be able to create readable, reliable, and robust applications in PHP to meet modern day requirements in the software industry.

Data Science Algorithms in a Week. Top 7 algorithms for scientific computing, data analysis, and machine learning - Second Edition

David Natingga

Machine learning applications are highly automated and self-modifying, and continue to improve over time with minimal human intervention, as they learn from the trained data. To address the complex nature of various real-world data problems, specialized machine learning algorithms have been developed. Through algorithmic and statistical analysis, these models can be leveraged to gain new knowledge from existing data as well.Data Science Algorithms in a Week addresses all problems related to accurate and efficient data classification and prediction. Over the course of seven days, you will be introduced to seven algorithms, along with exercises that will help you understand different aspects of machine learning. You will see how to pre-cluster your data to optimize and classify it for large datasets. This book also guides you in predicting data based on existing trends in your dataset. This book covers algorithms such as k-nearest neighbors, Naive Bayes, decision trees, random forest, k-means, regression, and time-series analysis.By the end of this book, you will understand how to choose machine learning algorithms for clustering, classification, and regression and know which is best suited for your problem

Getting Started with Nano Server. Automate multiple VMs and transform your datacenter

Charbel Nemnom

Nano Server allows developers and operations teams to work closely together and use containers that package applications so that the entire platform works as one. The aim of Nano Server is to help applications run the way they are intended to. It can be used to run and deploy infrastructures (acting as a compute host, storage host, container, or VM guest operating system) without consuming significant resources. Although Nano Server isn't intended to replace Server 2016 or 2012 R2, it will be an attractive choice for developers and IT teams.Want to improve your ability to deploy a new VM and install and deploy container apps within minutes? You have come to the right place! The objective of this book is to get you started with Nano Server successfully. The journey is quite exciting, since we are introducing you to a cutting-edge technology that will revolutionize today's datacenters. We'll cover everything from the basic to advanced topics. You'll discover a lot of added value from using Nano Server, such as hundreds of VM types on a single host through a small footprint, which could be a big plus for you and your company. After reading this book, you will have the necessary skills to start your journey effectively using Nano Server.

Kali Linux 2018: Windows Penetration Testing. Conduct network testing, surveillance, and pen testing on MS Windows using Kali Linux 2018 - Second Edition

Wolf Halton, Bo Weaver

Microsoft Windows is one of the two most common OSes, and managing its security has spawned the discipline of IT security. Kali Linux is the premier platform for testing and maintaining Windows security. Kali is built on the Debian distribution of Linux and shares the legendary stability of that OS. This lets you focus on using the network penetration, password cracking, and forensics tools, and not the OS.This book has the most advanced tools and techniques to reproduce the methods used by sophisticated hackers to make you an expert in Kali Linux penetration testing. You will start by learning about the various desktop environments that now come with Kali. The book covers network sniffers and analysis tools to uncover the Windows protocols in use on the network. You will see several tools designed to improve your average in password acquisition, from hash cracking, online attacks, offline attacks, and rainbow tables to social engineering. It also demonstrates several use cases for Kali Linux tools like Social Engineering Toolkit, and Metasploit, to exploit Windows vulnerabilities.Finally, you will learn how to gain full system-level access to your compromised system and then maintain that access. By the end of this book, you will be able to quickly pen test your system and network using easy-to-follow instructions and support images.

Kotlin Blueprints. A practical guide to building industry-grade web, mobile, and desktop applications in Kotlin using frameworks such as Spring Boot and Node.js

Ashish Belagali, Akshay Chordiya, Hardik Trivedi

Kotlin is a powerful language that has applications in a wide variety of fields. It is a concise, safe, interoperable, and tool-friendly language. The Android team has also announced first-class support for Kotlin, which is an added boost to the language. Kotlin’s growth is fueled through carefully designed business and technology benefits.The collection of projects demonstrates the versatility of the language and enables you to build standalone applications on your own. You’ll build comprehensive applications using the various features of Kotlin. Scale, performance, and high availability lie at the heart of the projects, and the lessons learned throughout this book.You’ll learn how to build a social media aggregator app that will help you efficiently track various feeds, develop a geospatial webservice with Kotlin and Spring Boot, build responsive web applications with Kotlin, build a REST API for a news feed reader, and build a server-side chat application with Kotlin.It also covers the various libraries and frameworks used in the projects. Through the course of building applications, you’ll not only get to grips with the various features of Kotlin, but you’ll also discover how to design and prototype professional-grade applications.

Docker on Windows. From 101 to production with Docker on Windows

Elton Stoneman

Docker is a platform for running server applications in lightweight units called containers. You can run Docker on Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10, and run your existing apps in containers to get significant improvements in efficiency, security, and portability. This book teaches you all you need to know about Docker on Windows, from 101 to deploying highly-available workloads in production. This book takes you on a Docker journey, starting with the key concepts and simple examples of how to run .NET Framework and .NET Core apps in Windows Docker containers. Then it moves on to more complex examples—using Docker to modernize the architecture and development of traditional ASP.NET and SQL Server apps.The examples show you how to break up monoliths into distributed apps and deploy them to a clustered environment in the cloud, using the exact same artifacts you use to run them locally. To help you move confidently to production, it then explains Docker security, and the management and support options. The book finishes with guidance on getting started with Docker in your own projects, together with some real-world case studies for Docker implementations, from small-scale on-premises apps to very large-scale apps running on Azure.

iOS Programming Cookbook. Over 50 exciting and powerful recipes to help you unearth the promise of iOS programming

Hossam Ghareeb

Do you want to understand all the facets of iOS programming and build complex iOS apps? Then you have come to the right place. This problem-solution guide will help you to eliminate expensive learning curves and focus on specific issues to make you proficient at tasks and the speed-up time involved.Beginning with some advanced UI components such as Stack Views and UICollectionView, you will gradually move on to building an interface efficiently.You will work through adding gesture recognizer and touch elements on table cells for custom actions. You will work with the Photos framework to access and manipulate photos. You will then prepare your app for multitasking and write responsive and highly efficient apps. Next, you will integrate maps and core location services while making your app more secure through various encryption methods. Finally, you will dive deep into the advanced techniques of implementing notifications while working with memory management and optimizing the performance of your apps. By the end of the book, you will master most of the latest iOS 10 frameworks.