Mastering the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. Take a deep dive into the world of Windows desktop deployment using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

Jeff Stokes, Manuel Singer

TopicThe Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) provides a comprehensive collection of tools, processes, and guidance for automating desktop and server deployments. It considerably reduces deployment time and standardizes desktop and server images. Moreover, MDT offers improved security and ongoing configuration management. Microsoft Deployment Toolkit is the official supported method of creating and customizing Windows images for deployment.Description:Starting from scratch, this book walks you through the MDT setup, task sequence creation, and image deployment steps in detail. Breaking down the various MDT concepts, this book will give you a thorough understanding of the deployment process.Beginning with imaging concepts and theory, you will go on to build a Microsoft Deployment Toolkit environment. You will understand the intricacies of customizing the default user profile in different versions of Windows. Driver handling can be a challenge for larger organizations; we’ll cover various driver concepts including mandatory driver profiles. ]Other important topics like the User State Migration Tool (USMT), configuration of XML files, and how to troubleshoot the USMT are also discussed in the book.We will cover the verifier and Windows Performance Toolkit for image validation scenarios. Furthermore, you will learn about MDT web frontend implementation as well as how to utilize the database capabilities of MDT for deeper deployment options. We’ll wrap it all up with some links to resources for more information, blogs to watch, and useful Twitter handles.

Federated Learning with Python. Design and implement a federated learning system and develop applications using existing frameworks

Kiyoshi Nakayama PhD, George Jeno

Federated learning (FL) is a paradigm-shifting technology in AI that enables and accelerates machine learning (ML), allowing you to work on private data. It has become a must-have solution for most enterprise industries, making it a critical part of your learning journey. This book helps you get to grips with the building blocks of FL and how the systems work and interact with each other using solid coding examples.FL is more than just aggregating collected ML models and bringing them back to the distributed agents. This book teaches you about all the essential basics of FL and shows you how to design distributed systems and learning mechanisms carefully so as to synchronize the dispersed learning processes and synthesize the locally trained ML models in a consistent manner. This way, you’ll be able to create a sustainable and resilient FL system that can constantly function in real-world operations. This book goes further than simply outlining FL's conceptual framework or theory, as is the case with the majority of research-related literature.By the end of this book, you’ll have an in-depth understanding of the FL system design and implementation basics and be able to create an FL system and applications that can be deployed to various local and cloud environments.

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide. The ultimate beginner's guide to data modeling, visualization, digital storytelling, and more - Third Edition

Devin Knight, Erin Ostrowsky, Mitchell Pearson, Bradley Schacht

Updated with the latest features and improvements in Power BI, this fast-paced yet comprehensive guide will help you master the core concepts of data visualization quickly. You’ll learn how to install Power BI, design effective data models, and build basic dashboards and visualizations to help you make better business decisions. This new edition will also help you bridge the gap between MS Excel and Power BI.Throughout this book, you’ll learn how to obtain data from a variety of sources and clean it using the Power Query Editor. You’ll also start designing data models to navigate and explore relationships within your data and building DAX formulas to make data easier to work with. Visualizing data is a key element of this book, so there’s an emphasis on helping you get to grips with data visualization styles and enhanced digital storytelling.As you progress, you’ll start building your own dataflows, gain an understanding of the Common Data Model, and automate dataflow refreshes to eradicate data cleaning inefficiency. You’ll learn how to administer your organization's Power BI environment so that deployment can be made seamless, data refreshes can run properly, and security can be fully implemented.By the end of this Power BI book, you’ll know how to get the most out of Power BI for better business intelligence.

Moodle 2.0 Course Conversion Beginner's Guide. Teachers, don’t be intimidated by e-learning! This book shows you how to take your existing course materials and transfer them quickly, effectively and – above all – easily into an e-learning course using Moodle. Absolute beginners welcome

Ian Wild, Moodle Trust

Schools, colleges and universities all over the world are installing Moodle, but many educators aren’t making much use of it. With so many features, it can be a hassle to learn – and with teachers under so much pressure day-to-day, they cannot devote much time to recreating all their lessons from scratch.This book provides the quickest way for teachers and trainers to get up and running with Moodle, by turning their familiar teaching materials into a Moodle e-learning course.This book shows how to bring your existing notes, worksheets, resources and lesson plans into Moodle quickly and easily. Instead of exploring every feature of Moodle, the book focuses on getting you started immediately – you will be turning your existing materials into Moodle courses right from the start.The book begins by showing how to turn your teaching schedule into a Moodle course, with the correct number of topics and weeks. You will then see how to convert your resources – documents, slideshows, and worksheets, into Moodle. You will learn how to format them in a way that means students will be able to read them, and along the way plenty of shortcuts to speed up the process.By the end of Chapter 3, you will already have a Moodle course that contains your learning resources in a presentable way. But the book doesn’t end there– you will also see how to use Moodle to accept and assess coursework submissions, discuss work with students, and deliver quizzes, tests, and video.Throughout the book, the focus is on getting results fast – moving teaching material online so that lessons become more effective for students, and less work for you.

Salesforce CRM - The Definitive Admin Handbook. Successfully administer Salesforce CRM and Salesforce mobile implementations with best practices and real-world scenarios

Paul Goodey

The Data Wrangling Workshop. Create your own actionable insights using data from multiple raw sources - Second Edition

Brian Lipp, Shubhadeep Roychowdhury, Dr. Tirthajyoti Sarkar

While a huge amount of data is readily available to us, it is not useful in its raw form. For data to be meaningful, it must be curated and refined.If you’re a beginner, then The Data Wrangling Workshop will help to break down the process for you. You’ll start with the basics and build your knowledge, progressing from the core aspects behind data wrangling, to using the most popular tools and techniques.This book starts by showing you how to work with data structures using Python. Through examples and activities, you’ll understand why you should stay away from traditional methods of data cleaning used in other languages and take advantage of the specialized pre-built routines in Python. Later, you’ll learn how to use the same Python backend to extract and transform data from an array of sources, including the internet, large database vaults, and Excel financial tables. To help you prepare for more challenging scenarios, the book teaches you how to handle missing or incorrect data, and reformat it based on the requirements from your downstream analytics tool.By the end of this book, you will have developed a solid understanding of how to perform data wrangling with Python, and learned several techniques and best practices to extract, clean, transform, and format your data efficiently, from a diverse array of sources.

Java EE 7 First Look. Discover the new features of Java EE 7 and learn to put them together to build a large-scale application

NDJOBO Armel Fabrice, Armel Fabrice NDJOBO

For several years, the development of robust, scalable, and secured applications was a headache for software companies. They had to use proprietary solutions with non-standard methods. With Java EE, many of these solutions have been standardized, simplified, adapted to the needs of the developer, and made freely available to the community. Thus, it is now possible to develop truly robust, secure, and scalable applications at a lower cost using tools such as: Eclipse, NetBeans, and GlassFish.Java EE 7 First Look is a practical guide which, through the creation of an online pre-registration website, will introduce you to the novelties of Java EE 7 and give you ideas for utilizing them.Giving you an insight on new features introduced in Java EE 7, this book begins with the objectives of Java EE 7 and then covers the new specifications added in Java EE 7. Next, you will move on to the improvements made in APIs and EJBs and how to work with them. You will also learn how to ensure that the quality of data is maintained that has been manipulated by your application and gives you the opportunity to put a small part of AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) in action.Finally, the book will give you some ideas to realize n-tier applications using the Java EE platform and will also provide some guidance for the integration of your Java EE application to heterogeneous systems with which your application will interact.After reading Java EE 7 First Look, you'll have a good idea about the changes brought in by Java EE 7, as well as how to make the best use of these to build a large-scale application.

Mastering Xamarin.Forms. App architecture techniques for building multi-platform, native mobile apps with Xamarin.Forms 4 - Third Edition

Ed Snider, David Ortinau

Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the most recent version of Xamarin.Forms to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. This new edition features Xamarin.Forms 4 updates, including CollectionView and RefreshView, new coverage of client-side validation, and updates on how to implement user authentication.Mastering Xamarin.Forms, Third Edition is one of the few Xamarin books structured around the development of a simple app from start to finish, beginning with a basic Xamarin.Forms app and going step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices.This book introduces a core separation between the app's user interface and the app's business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data binding, and then focuses on building a layer of plugin-like services that handle platform-specific utilities such as navigation and geo-location, as well as how to loosely use these services in the app with inversion of control and dependency injection. You’ll connect the app to a live web-based API and set up offline synchronization before testing the app logic through unit testing. Finally, you will learn how to add monitoring to your Xamarin.Forms projects to track crashes and analytics and gain a proactive edge on quality.