3D Game Design with Unreal Engine 4 and Blender. Combine the powerful UE4 with Blender to create visually appealing and comprehensive game environments

Jessica Plowman

Unreal Engine 4 now has support for Blender, which was not available in earlier versions. This has opened up new possibilities and that is where this book comes in. This is the first book in the market combining these two powerful game and graphic engines. Readers will build an amazing high-level game environment with UE4 and will show them how to use the power of Blender 3D to create stunning animations and 3D effects for their game. This book will start with creating levels, 3D assets for the game, game progression, light and environment control, animation, and so on. Then it will teach readers to add amazing visual effects to their game by applying rendering, lighting, rigging, and compositing techniques in Blender. Finally, readers will learn how to smoothly transfer blender files to UE4 and animate the game assets. Each chapter will add complexities to the game environment.

Codeless Time Series Analysis with KNIME. A practical guide to implementing forecasting models for time series analysis applications

KNIME AG, Corey Weisinger, Maarit Widmann, Daniele Tonini

This book will take you on a practical journey, teaching you how to implement solutions for many use cases involving time series analysis techniques.This learning journey is organized in a crescendo of difficulty, starting from the easiest yet effective techniques applied to weather forecasting, then introducing ARIMA and its variations, moving on to machine learning for audio signal classification, training deep learning architectures to predict glucose levels and electrical energy demand, and ending with an approach to anomaly detection in IoT. There’s no time series analysis book without a solution for stock price predictions and you’ll find this use case at the end of the book, together with a few more demand prediction use cases that rely on the integration of KNIME Analytics Platform and other external tools.By the end of this time series book, you’ll have learned about popular time series analysis techniques and algorithms, KNIME Analytics Platform, its time series extension, and how to apply both to common use cases.

Effortless Cloud-Native App Development Using Skaffold. Simplify the development and deployment of cloud-native Spring Boot applications on Kubernetes with Skaffold

Ashish Choudhary

Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration, drastically improving how we deploy and manage cloud-native apps. Although it has simplified the lives of support professionals, we cannot say the same for developers who need to be equipped with better tools to increase productivity. An automated workflow that solves a wide variety of problems that every developer faces can make all the difference!Enter Skaffold – a command-line tool that automates the build, push, and deploy steps for Kubernetes applications.This book is divided into three parts, starting with common challenges encountered by developers in building apps with Kubernetes. The second part covers Skaffold features, its architecture, supported container image builders, and more. In the last part, you'll focus on practical implementation, learning how to deploy Spring Boot apps to cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using Skaffold. You'll also create CI/CD pipelines for your cloud-native apps with Skaffold. Although the examples covered in this book are written in Java and Spring Boot, the techniques can be applied to apps built using other technologies too.By the end of this Skaffold book, you'll develop skills that will help accelerate your inner development loop and be able to build and deploy your apps to the Kubernetes cluster with Skaffold.

Azure Synapse Analytics Cookbook. Implement a limitless analytical platform using effective recipes for Azure Synapse

Gaurav Agarwal, Meenakshi Muralidharan, Dr Rohini Srivathsa

As data warehouse management becomes increasingly integral to successful organizations, choosing and running the right solution is more important than ever. Microsoft Azure Synapse is an enterprise-grade, cloud-based data warehousing platform, and this book holds the key to using Synapse to its full potential. If you want the skills and confidence to create a robust enterprise analytical platform, this cookbook is a great place to start.You'll learn and execute enterprise-level deployments on medium-to-large data platforms. Using the step-by-step recipes and accompanying theory covered in this book, you'll understand how to integrate various services with Synapse to make it a robust solution for all your data needs. Whether you're new to Azure Synapse or just getting started, you'll find the instructions you need to solve any problem you may face, including using Azure services for data visualization as well as for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions.By the end of this Azure book, you'll have the skills you need to implement an enterprise-grade analytical platform, enabling your organization to explore and manage heterogeneous data workloads and employ various data integration services to solve real-time industry problems.

Hands-On Deep Learning for IoT. Train neural network models to develop intelligent IoT applications

Dr. Mohammad Abdur Razzaque, Md. Rezaul Karim

Artificial Intelligence is growing quickly, which is driven by advancements in neural networks(NN) and deep learning (DL). With an increase in investments in smart cities, smart healthcare, and industrial Internet of Things (IoT), commercialization of IoT will soon be at peak in which massive amounts of data generated by IoT devices need to be processed at scale. Hands-On Deep Learning for IoT will provide deeper insights into IoT data, which will start by introducing how DL fits into the context of making IoT applications smarter. It then covers how to build deep architectures using TensorFlow, Keras, and Chainer for IoT. You’ll learn how to train convolutional neural networks(CNN) to develop applications for image-based road faults detection and smart garbage separation, followed by implementing voice-initiated smart light control and home access mechanisms powered by recurrent neural networks(RNN). You’ll master IoT applications for indoor localization, predictive maintenance, and locating equipment in a large hospital using autoencoders, DeepFi, and LSTM networks. Furthermore, you’ll learn IoT application development for healthcare with IoT security enhanced. By the end of this book, you will have sufficient knowledge need to use deep learning efficiently to power your IoT-based applications for smarter decision making.

Becoming a Rockstar SRE. Electrify your site reliability engineering mindset to build reliable, resilient, and efficient systems

Jeremy Proffitt, Rod Anami

Site reliability engineering is all about continuous improvement, finding the balance between business and product demands while working within technological limitations to drive higher revenue. But quantifying and understanding reliability, handling resources, and meeting developer requirements can sometimes be overwhelming. With a focus on reliability from an infrastructure and coding perspective, Becoming a Rockstar SRE brings forth the site reliability engineer (SRE) persona using real-world examples.This book will acquaint you the role of an SRE, followed by the why and how of site reliability engineering. It walks you through the jobs of an SRE, from the automation of CI/CD pipelines and reducing toil to reliability best practices. You’ll learn what creates bad code and how to circumvent it with reliable design and patterns. The book also guides you through interacting and negotiating with businesses and vendors on various technical matters and exploring observability, outages, and why and how to craft an excellent runbook. Finally, you’ll learn how to elevate your site reliability engineering career, including certifications and interview tips and questions.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to identify and measure reliability, reduce downtime, troubleshoot outages, and enhance productivity to become a true rockstar SRE!

Scratch 2.0 Game Development HOTSHOT. Get up to date with Scratch 2.0 and build brilliant games without having to code. Including 10 exciting projects that cover most game genres, you’ll quickly learn the sophisticated possibilities of Scratch. Have fun!

Jessica Chiang, Sergio van Pul

Maximize Your Investment: 10 Key Strategies for Effective Packaged Software Implementations. Accelerate packaged (COTS) software implementations, increase returns on investment, and reduce implementation costs and customizations with this book and

Grady Brett Beaubouef

Using packaged software for Customer Relationship Management or Enterprise Resource Planning is often seen as a sure-fire way to reduce costs, refocus scarce resources, and increase returns on investment. However, research shows that the majority of packaged or Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) implementations fail to provide this value due to the implementation approach taken.Authored by Grady Brett Beaubouef, who has over fifteen years of packaged software implementation experience, this book will help you define an effective implementation strategy for your packaged software investment.The book focuses on Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) implementations, and helps you to successfully implement packaged software. Using a step-by-step approach, it begins with an assessment of the limitations of current implementation methods for packaged software. It then helps you to analyze your requirements and offers 10 must-know principles gleaned from real-world packaged software implementations. These 10 principles cover how to maximize enhancements and minimize customizations, focus on business results, and negotiate for success, and so on. You will learn how to best leverage these principles as part of your implementation. As you progress through the book, you will learn how to put packaged software into action with forethought, planning, and proper execution. Doing so will lead to reductions in implementation costs, customizations, and development time.