Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On. Apply modern RL methods, with deep Q-networks, value iteration, policy gradients, TRPO, AlphaGo Zero and more

Maxim Lapan

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On is a comprehensive guide to the very latest DL tools and their limitations. You will evaluate methods including Cross-entropy and policy gradients, before applying them to real-world environments. Take on both the Atari set of virtual games and family favorites such as Connect4.The book provides an introduction to the basics of RL, giving you the know-how to code intelligent learning agents to take on a formidable array of practical tasks. Discover how to implement Q-learning on 'grid world' environments, teach your agent to buy and trade stocks, and find out how natural language models are driving the boom in chatbots.

Firebase Cookbook. Over 70 recipes to help you create real-time web and mobile applications with Firebase

Houssem Yahiaoui

Do you feel tired just thinking or even hearing about backend technologies, authentication or the tedious task of deployment? Firebase is here to change the way you develop and make your app a first-class citizen of the cloud.This books takes a solution based approach by providing you recipes that would help you understand the features of Firebase and implement them in your existing web or mobile applications.We start-off by creating our first Firebase application and integrating its services into different platforms and environments for mobile as well as web applications. Then we deep dive into Real-time Database and Firebase Storage that allows your users to access data across various devices with realtive ease. With each chapter you will gradually create the building blocks of your application from securing your data with Firebase Rules to authenticating your users with O-Auth.Moving along we would explore modern application development techniques such as creating serverless applications with Firebase Cloud Functions or turning your traditional applications into progressive apps with Service workers.Finally you will learn how to create cross-platform mobile apps, integrate Firebase in native platforms, and learn how to monetize your mobile applications using Admob for Android and iOS.

Learning Functional Data Structures and Algorithms. Click here to enter text

Atul S. Khot, Raju Kumar Mishra

Functional data structures have the power to improve the codebase of an application and improve efficiency. With the advent of functional programming and with powerful functional languages such as Scala, Clojure and Elixir becoming part of important enterprise applications, functional data structures have gained an important place in the developer toolkit. Immutability is a cornerstone of functional programming. Immutable and persistent data structures are thread safe by definition and hence very appealing for writing robust concurrent programs. How do we express traditional algorithms in functional setting? Won’t we end up copying too much? Do we trade performance for versioned data structures? This book attempts to answer these questions by looking at functional implementations of traditional algorithms. It begins with a refresher and consolidation of what functional programming is all about. Next, you’ll get to know about Lists, the work horse data type for most functional languages. We show what structural sharing means and how it helps to make immutable data structures efficient and practical. Scala is the primary implementation languages for most of the examples. At times, we also present Clojure snippets to illustrate the underlying fundamental theme. While writing code, we use ADTs (abstract data types). Stacks, Queues, Trees and Graphs are all familiar ADTs. You will see how these ADTs are implemented in a functional setting. We look at implementation techniques like amortization and lazy evaluation to ensure efficiency.By the end of the book, you will be able to write efficient functional data structures and algorithms for your applications.

Deploying Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager. Manage complex and heterogeneous workloads with ConfigMgr 1706

Jacek Doktór, Paweł Jarosz

It becomes important to plan, design, and deploy configurations when administrators know that Configuration Manager interacts with a number of infrastructure components such as Active Directory Domain Services, network protocols, Windows Server services, and so on.Via real-world-world deployment scenarios, this book will help you implement a single primary site or multiples sites. You will be able to efficiently plan and deploy a multiple-site hierarchy such as central administration site. Next, you will learn various methods to plan and deploy Configuration Manager clients, secure them and make the most of new features offered through ConfigMgr 1706 like compliance, deploying updates operating systems to the endpoints. Then, this book will show you how to install, configure, and run SQL reports to extract information. Lastly, you will also learn how to create and manage users access in an ConfigMgr environmentBy the end of this book, you will have learned to use the built-in mechanism to back up and restore data and also design maintenance plan.

Raspberry Pi 3 Home Automation Projects. Bringing your home to life using Raspberry Pi 3, Arduino, and ESP8266

Shantanu Bhadoria, Ruben Oliva Ramos

Raspberry Pi 3 Home Automation Projects addresses the challenge of applying real-world projects to automate your house using Raspberry Pi 3 and Arduino. You will learn how to customize and program the Raspberry Pi 3 and Arduino-based boards in several home automation projects around your house.This book aims to help you integrate different microcontrollers like Arduino, ESP8266 Wi-Fi module, Particle Photon and Raspberry Pi 3 into the real world, taking the best of these boards to develop some exciting home automation projects. We will start with an interesting project creating a Raspberry Pi Powered smart mirror and move on to Automated Gardening System, which will help you build a simple smart gardening to keep your garden healthy with minimal effort. You will also learn to build projects such as CheerLights into a holiday display, a project to erase parking headaches with OpenCV and Raspberry Pi 3, create Netfl ix's The Switch for the living room and lock down your house like Fort Knox with a Windows IoT face recognition-based door lock system.By the end of the book, you will be able to build and automate the living space with intriguing IoT projects and bring a new degree of inter connectivity to your world.

Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux. Explore the methods and tools of ethical hacking with Kali Linux - Third Edition

Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez, Juned Ahmed Ansari

Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux - Third Edition shows you how to set up a lab, helps you understand the nature and mechanics of attacking websites, and explains classical attacks in great depth. This edition is heavily updated for the latest Kali Linux changes and the most recent attacks. Kali Linux shines when it comes to client-side attacks and fuzzing in particular.From the start of the book, you'll be given a thorough grounding in the concepts of hacking and penetration testing, and you'll see the tools used in Kali Linux that relate to web application hacking. You'll gain a deep understanding of classicalSQL, command-injection flaws, and the many ways to exploit these flaws. Web penetration testing also needs a general overview of client-side attacks, which is rounded out by a long discussion of scripting and input validation flaws.There is also an important chapter on cryptographic implementation flaws, where we discuss the most recent problems with cryptographic layers in the networking stack.The importance of these attacks cannot be overstated, and defending against them is relevant to most internet users and, of course, penetration testers.At the end of the book, you'll use an automated technique called fuzzing to identify flaws in a web application. Finally, you'll gain an understanding of web application vulnerabilities and the ways they can be exploited using the tools in Kali Linux.

Enterprise Application Architecture with .NET Core. An architectural journey into the Microsoft .NET open source platform

Ganesan Senthilvel, Ovais Mehboob Ahmed Khan, Habib Qureshi

If you want to design and develop enterprise applications using .NET Core as the development framework and learn about industry-wide best practices and guidelines, then this book is for you. The book starts with a brief introduction to enterprise architecture, which will help you to understand what enterprise architecture is and what the key components are. It will then teach you about the types of patterns and the principles of software development, and explain the various aspects of distributed computing to keep your applications effective and scalable. These chapters act as a catalyst to start the practical implementation, and design and develop applications using different architectural approaches, such as layered architecture, service oriented architecture, microservices and cloud-specific solutions. Gradually, you will learn about the different approaches and models of the Security framework and explore various authentication models and authorization techniques, such as social media-based authentication and safe storage using app secrets. By the end of the book, you will get to know the concepts and usage of the emerging fields, such as DevOps, BigData, architectural practices, and Artificial Intelligence.

Guide to NoSQL with Azure Cosmos DB. Work with the massively scalable Azure database service with JSON, C#, LINQ, and .NET Core 2

Gaston C. Hillar, Daron Yöndem

Cosmos DB is a NoSQL database service included in Azure that is continuously adding new features and has quickly become one of the most innovative services found in Azure, targeting mission-critical applications at a global scale. This book starts off by showing you the main features of Cosmos DB, their supported NoSQL data models and the foundations of its scalable and distributed architecture. You will learn to work with the latest available tools that simplify your tasks with Cosmos DB and reduce development costs, such as the Data Explorer in the Azure portal, Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer, and the Cosmos DB Emulator.Next, move on to working with databases and document collections. We will use the tools to run schema agnostic queries against collections with the Cosmos DB SQL dialect and understand their results. Then, we will create a first version of an application that uses the latest .NET Core SDK to interact with Cosmos DB. Next, we will create a second version of the application that will take advantage of important features that the combination of C# and the .NET Core SDK provides, such as POCOs and LINQ queries. By the end of the book, you will be able to build an application that works with a Cosmos DB NoSQL document database with C#, the .NET Core SDK, LINQ, and JSON.