Big Data Analytics with R. Leverage R Programming to uncover hidden patterns in your Big Data

Simon Walkowiak

Big Data analytics is the process of examining large and complex data sets that often exceed the computational capabilities. R is a leading programming language of data science, consisting of powerful functions to tackle all problems related to Big Data processing.The book will begin with a brief introduction to the Big Data world and its current industry standards. With introduction to the R language and presenting its development, structure, applications in real world, and its shortcomings. Book will progress towards revision of major R functions for data management and transformations. Readers will be introduce to Cloud based Big Data solutions (e.g. Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon RDS, Microsoft Azure and its HDInsight clusters) and also provide guidance on R connectivity with relational and non-relational databases such as MongoDB and HBase etc. It will further expand to include Big Data tools such as Apache Hadoop ecosystem, HDFS and MapReduce frameworks. Also other R compatible tools such as Apache Spark, its machine learning library Spark MLlib, as well as H2O.

Learning Material Design. Master Material Design and create beautiful, animated interfaces for mobile and web applications

Kyle Mew

Google's Material Design language has taken the web development and design worlds by storm. Now available on many more platforms than Android, Material Design uses color, light, and movements to not only generate beautiful interfaces, but to provide intuitive navigation for the user.Learning Material Design will teach you the fundamental theories of Material Design using code samples to put these theories into practice.Focusing primarily on Android Studio, you’ll create mobile interfaces using the most widely used and powerful material components, such as sliding drawers and floating action buttons. Each section will introduce the relevant Java classes and APIs required to implement these components. With the rules regarding structure, layout, iconography, and typography covered, we then move into animation and transition, possibly Material Design's most powerful concept, allowing complex hierarchies to be displayed simply and stylishly.With all the basic technologies and concepts mastered, the book concludes by showing you how these skills can be applied to other platforms, in particular web apps, using the powerful Polymer library.

Hands-On Reinforcement Learning for Games. Implementing self-learning agents in games using artificial intelligence techniques

Micheal Lanham

With the increased presence of AI in the gaming industry, developers are challenged to create highly responsive and adaptive games by integrating artificial intelligence into their projects. This book is your guide to learning how various reinforcement learning techniques and algorithms play an important role in game development with Python.Starting with the basics, this book will help you build a strong foundation in reinforcement learning for game development. Each chapter will assist you in implementing different reinforcement learning techniques, such as Markov decision processes (MDPs), Q-learning, actor-critic methods, SARSA, and deterministic policy gradient algorithms, to build logical self-learning agents. Learning these techniques will enhance your game development skills and add a variety of features to improve your game agent’s productivity. As you advance, you’ll understand how deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques can be used to devise strategies to help agents learn from their actions and build engaging games.By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to apply reinforcement learning techniques to build a variety of projects and contribute to open source applications.

RESTful Java Web Services Security. Secure your RESTful applications against common vulnerabilities with this book and

René Enríquez

Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development - Made Simple

Sten E Vesterli

Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook. With this highly focused book you’ll learn how to bring your characters to life using Blender, employing everything from realistic movement to refined eye control. Written in a user-friendly manner, it’s the only guide dedicated to this subject

Virgilio Vasconcelos, Virgilio Carlo de Menezes Vasconcelos, Ton Roosendaal

Blender is an open source 3D graphics application that can be used for modeling, rigging, animating, rendering and thousands of other things. While modeling characters isn't the biggest of your worries, animating them to make them feel as-good-as alive is what differentiates a professional from an amateur. This book offers clear, illustrative, and easy-to-follow recipes to create character rigs and animations for common situations. Bring your characters to life by understanding the principles, techniques and approaches involved in creating rigs and animations, you'll be able to adapt them to your own characters and films. The book offers clear step-by-step tutorials, with detailed explanations, screenshots and support files to help you understand the principles behind each topic. Each recipe covers a logical step of the complete creation of a character rig and animation, so you're not overwhelmed with too much information at once.You'll see numerous examples and screenshots that guide to achieve various rigging and animation tasks, logically separated so you can understand each in detail. The rigging topics are divided by each region of the body (torso, limbs, face, eyes), and further separated by the specific topic (neck, fingers, mouth, eyelids, etc) for clarity. All rigging tasks are accomplished with the built-in tools in Blender, without the complexity of coding custom Python behaviors or user interface elements.The animation topics deal with common situations found in real world productions, showing good practices to understand and overcome the challenges.

Hands-On Web Scraping with Python. Perform advanced scraping operations using various Python libraries and tools such as Selenium, Regex, and others

Anish Chapagain

Web scraping is an essential technique used in many organizations to gather valuable data from web pages. This book will enable you to delve into web scraping techniques and methodologies.The book will introduce you to the fundamental concepts of web scraping techniques and how they can be applied to multiple sets of web pages. You'll use powerful libraries from the Python ecosystem such as Scrapy, lxml, pyquery, and bs4 to carry out web scraping operations. You will then get up to speed with simple to intermediate scraping operations such as identifying information from web pages and using patterns or attributes to retrieve information. This book adopts a practical approach to web scraping concepts and tools, guiding you through a series of use cases and showing you how to use the best tools and techniques to efficiently scrape web pages. You'll even cover the use of other popular web scraping tools, such as Selenium, Regex, and web-based APIs.By the end of this book, you will have learned how to efficiently scrape the web using different techniques with Python and other popular tools.

The AI Value Playbook. How to make AI work in the real world

Lisa Weaver-Lambert

Business leaders are challenged by the speed of AI innovation and how to navigate disruption and uncertainty. This book is a crucial resource for those who want to understand how to leverage AI to drive business value, drawn from the firsthand experience of those who have been implementing this technology successfully. The AI Value Playbook focuses on questions frequently posed by leaders and boards. How can businesses adapt to these emerging technologies? How can they start building and deploying AI as a strategic asset to drive efficiency? What risks or threats need to be considered? How quickly can value be created? This book is a response to those demands. In a series of in-depth and wide-ranging conversations with practitioners, from CEOs leading new generative AI-based companies to Data Scientists and CFOs working in more traditional companies. Our experts share their hard-earned wisdom, talking candidly about their successes and failures, and what excites them about the future. These interviews offer unique insights for business leaders to apply to their own organizations. The book distils a value-driven playbook for how AI can be put to work today.