BeagleBone Media Center. A practical guide to transforming your BeagleBone into a fully functional media center

David Lewin

HLSL Development Cookbook. Implement stunning 3D rendering techniques using the power of HLSL and DirectX 11

Doron Feinstein, Doron Feinstein

3D graphics are becoming increasingly more realistic and sophisticated as the power of modern hardware improves. The High Level Shader Language (HLSL) allows you to harness the power of shaders within DirectX 11, so that you can push the boundaries of 3D rendering like never before.HLSL Development Cookbook will provide you with a series of essential recipes to help you make the most out of different rendering techniques used within games and simulations using the DirectX 11 API.This book is specifically designed to help build your understanding via practical example. This essential Cookbook has coverage ranging from industry-standard lighting techniques to more specialist post-processing implementations such as bloom and tone mapping. Explained in a clear yet concise manner, each recipe is also accompanied by superb examples with full documentation so that you can harness the power of HLSL for your own individual requirements.

Getting Started with Google BERT. Build and train state-of-the-art natural language processing models using BERT

Sudharsan Ravichandiran

BERT (bidirectional encoder representations from transformer) has revolutionized the world of natural language processing (NLP) with promising results. This book is an introductory guide that will help you get to grips with Google's BERT architecture. With a detailed explanation of the transformer architecture, this book will help you understand how the transformer’s encoder and decoder work.You’ll explore the BERT architecture by learning how the BERT model is pre-trained and how to use pre-trained BERT for downstream tasks by fine-tuning it for NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis and text summarization with the Hugging Face transformers library. As you advance, you’ll learn about different variants of BERT such as ALBERT, RoBERTa, and ELECTRA, and look at SpanBERT, which is used for NLP tasks like question answering. You'll also cover simpler and faster BERT variants based on knowledge distillation such as DistilBERT and TinyBERT. The book takes you through MBERT, XLM, and XLM-R in detail and then introduces you to sentence-BERT, which is used for obtaining sentence representation. Finally, you'll discover domain-specific BERT models such as BioBERT and ClinicalBERT, and discover an interesting variant called VideoBERT.By the end of this BERT book, you’ll be well-versed with using BERT and its variants for performing practical NLP tasks.

Pentaho Data Integration Cookbook. The premier open source ETL tool is at your command with this recipe-packed cookbook. Learn to use data sources in Kettle, avoid pitfalls, and dig out the advanced features of Pentaho Data Integration the easy way. - Second Edition

Adrian Sergio Pulvirenti, María Carina Roldán, Alex Meadows

Pentaho Data Integration is the premier open source ETL tool, providing easy, fast, and effective ways to move and transform data. While PDI is relatively easy to pick up, it can take time to learn the best practices so you can design your transformations to process data faster and more efficiently. If you are looking for clear and practical recipes that will advance your skills in Kettle, then this is the book for you.Pentaho Data Integration Cookbook Second Edition guides you through the features of explains the Kettle features in detail and provides easy to follow recipes on file management and databases that can throw a curve ball to even the most experienced developers.Pentaho Data Integration Cookbook Second Edition provides updates to the material covered in the first edition as well as new recipes that show you how to use some of the key features of PDI that have been released since the publication of the first edition. You will learn how to work with various data sources – from relational and NoSQL databases, flat files, XML files, and more. The book will also cover best practices that you can take advantage of immediately within your own solutions, like building reusable code, data quality, and plugins that can add even more functionality.Pentaho Data Integration Cookbook Second Edition will provide you with the recipes that cover the common pitfalls that even seasoned developers can find themselves facing. You will also learn how to use various data sources in Kettle as well as advanced features.

Eleventy by Example. Create powerful, performant websites with a static-first strategy

Bryan Robinson

11ty is the dark horse of the Jamstack world, offering unparalleled flexibility and performance that gives it an edge against other static site generators such as Jekyll and Hugo. With it, developers can leverage the complete Node ecosystem and create blazing-fast, static-first websites that can be deployed from a content delivery network or a simple server. This book will teach you how to set up, customize, and make the most of 11ty in no time.Eleventy by Example helps you uncover everything you need to create your first 11ty website before diving into making more complex sites and extending 11ty’s base functionality with custom short codes, plugins, and content types. Over the course of 5 interactive projects, you’ll learn how to build basic websites, blogs, media sites, and static sites that will respond to user input without the need for a server. With these, you’ll learn basic 11ty skills such as templates, collections, and data use, along with advanced skills such as plugin creation, image manipulation, working with a headless CMS, and the use of the powerful 11ty Serverless plugin.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to leverage the capabilities of 11ty by implementing best practices and reusable techniques that can be applied across multiple projects, reducing the website launch time.

The Art of Writing Efficient Programs. An advanced programmer's guide to efficient hardware utilization and compiler optimizations using C++ examples

Fedor G. Pikus

The great free lunch of performance taking care of itself is over. Until recently, programs got faster by themselves as CPUs were upgraded, but that doesn't happen anymore. The clock frequency of new processors has almost peaked, and while new architectures provide small improvements to existing programs, this only helps slightly. To write efficient software, you now have to know how to program by making good use of the available computing resources, and this book will teach you how to do that.The Art of Efficient Programming covers all the major aspects of writing efficient programs, such as using CPU resources and memory efficiently, avoiding unnecessary computations, measuring performance, and how to put concurrency and multithreading to good use. You'll also learn about compiler optimizations and how to use the programming language (C++) more efficiently. Finally, you'll understand how design decisions impact performance.By the end of this book, you'll not only have enough knowledge of processors and compilers to write efficient programs, but you'll also be able to understand which techniques to use and what to measure while improving performance. At its core, this book is about learning how to learn.

Implementing Event-Driven Microservices Architecture in .NET 7. Develop event-based distributed apps that can scale with ever-changing business demands using C# 11 and .NET 7

Donovan Brown, Joshua Garverick, Omar Dean McIver

This book will guide you through various hands-on practical examples for implementing event-driven microservices architecture using C# 11 and .NET 7. It has been divided into three distinct sections, each focusing on different aspects of this implementation.The first section will cover the new features of .NET 7 that will make developing applications using EDA patterns easier, the sample application that will be used throughout the book, and how the core tenets of domain-driven design (DDD) are implemented in .NET 7.The second section will review the various components of a local environment setup, the containerization of code, testing, deployment, and the observability of microservices using an EDA approach.The third section will guide you through the need for scalability and service resilience within the application, along with implementation details related to elastic and autoscale components. You’ll also cover how proper telemetry helps to automatically drive scaling events. In addition, the topic of observability is revisited using examples of service discovery and microservice inventories.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to identify and catalog domains, events, and bounded contexts to be used for the design and development of a resilient microservices architecture.

Matplotlib for Python Developers. Python developers who want to learn Matplotlib need look no further. This book covers it all with a practical approach including lots of code and images. Take this chance to learn 2D plotting through real-world examples

Sandro Tosi, John Hunter, Sandro Tosi

Providing appealing plots and graphs is an essential part of various fields such as scientific research, data analysis, and so on. Matplotlib, the Python 2D plotting library, is used to produce publication-quality figures in a variety of hardcopy formats and interactive environments across platforms. This book explains creating various plots, histograms, power spectra, bar charts, error charts, scatter-plots and much more using the powerful Matplotlib library to get impressive out-of-the-box results.This book gives you a comprehensive tour of the key features of the Matplotlib Python 2D plotting library, right from the simplest concepts to the most advanced topics. You will discover how easy it is to produce professional-quality plots when you have this book to hand.The book introduces the library in steps. First come the basics: introducing what the library is, its important prerequisites (and terminology), installing and configuring Matplotlib, and going through simple plots such as lines, grids, axes, and charts. Then we start with some introductory examples, and move ahead by discussing the various programming styles that Matplotlib allows, and several key features.Further, the book presents an important section on embedding applications. You will be introduced to three of the best known GUI libraries 'GTK+, Qt, and wxWidgets' and presented with the steps to implement to include Matplotlib in an application written using each of them. You will learn through an incremental approach: from a simple example that presents the peculiarities of the GUI library, to more complex ones, using GUI designer tools.Because the Web permeates all of our activities, a part of the book is dedicated to showing how Matplotlib can be used in a web environment, and another section focuses on using Matplotlib with common Python web frameworks, namely, Pylons and Django. Last, but not least, you will go through real-world examples, where you will see some real situations in which you can use Matplotlib.