Hands-On Android UI Development. Design and develop attractive user interfaces for Android applications

Jason Morris

A great user interface (UI) can spell the difference between success and failure for any new application. This book will show you not just how to code great UIs, but how to design them as well. It will take novice Android developers on a journey, showing them how to leverage the Android platform to produce stunning Android applications. Begin with the basics of creating Android applications and then move on to topics such as screen and layout design. Next, learn about techniques that will help improve performance for your application. Also, explore how to create reactive applications that are fast, animated, and guide the user toward their goals with minimal distraction. Understand Android architecture components and learn how to build your application to automatically respond to changes made by the user. Great platforms are not always enough, so this book also focuses on creating custom components, layout managers, and 2D graphics. Also, explore many tips and best practices to ease your UI development process. By the end, you'll be able to design and build not only amazing UIs, but also systems that provide the best possible user experience.

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming. Design, build, and simulate complex robots using the Robot Operating System - Second Edition

Jonathan Cacace, Lentin Joseph

In this day and age, robotics has been gaining a lot of traction in various industries where consistency and perfection matter. Automation is achieved via robotic applications and various platforms that support robotics. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a modular software platform to develop generic robotic applications. This book focuses on the most stable release of ROS (Kinetic Kame), discusses advanced concepts, and effectively teaches you programming using ROS.We begin with aninformative overview of the ROS framework, which will give you a clear idea of how ROS works. During the course of this book, you’ll learn to build models of complex robots, and simulate and interface the robot using the ROS MoveIt! motion planning library and ROS navigation stacks. Learn to leverage several ROS packages to embrace your robot models.After covering robot manipulation and navigation, you’ll get to grips with the interfacing I/O boards, sensors, and actuators of ROS. Vision sensors are a key component of robots, and an entire chapter is dedicated to the vision sensor and image elaboration, its interface in ROS and programming. You’ll also understand the hardware interface and simulation of complex robots to ROS and ROS Industrial.At the end of this book, you’ll discover the best practices to follow when programming using ROS.

Learning Functional Programming in Go. Change the way you approach your applications using functional programming in Go

Lex Sheehan

Lex Sheehan begins slowly, using easy-to-understand illustrations and working Go code to teach core functional programming (FP) principles such as referential transparency, laziness, recursion, currying, and chaining continuations.This book is a tutorial for programmers looking to learn FP and apply it to write better code. Lex guides readers from basic techniques to advanced topics in a logical, concise, and clear progression.The book is divided into four modules. The first module explains the functional style of programming: pure functional programming, manipulating collections, and using higher-order functions. In the second module, you will learn design patterns that you can use to build FP-style applications. In the next module, you will learn FP techniques that you can use to improve your API signatures, increase performance, and build better cloud-native applications. The last module covers Category Theory, Functors, Monoids, Monads, Type classes and Generics.By the end of the book, you will be adept at building applications the FP way.

IBM Watson Projects. Eight exciting projects that put artificial intelligence into practice for optimal business performance

James D. Miller

IBM Watson provides fast, intelligent insight in ways that the human brain simply can't match. Through eight varied projects, this book will help you explore the computing and analytical capabilities of IBM Watson.The book begins by refreshing your knowledge of IBM Watson's basic data preparation capabilities, such as adding and exploring data to prepare it for being applied to models. The projects covered in this book can be developed for different industries, including banking, healthcare, media, and security. These projects will enable you to develop an AI mindset and guide you in developing smart data-driven projects, including automating supply chains, analyzing sentiment in social media datasets, and developing personalized recommendations.By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to develop solutions for process automation, and you'll be able to make better data-driven decisions to deliver an excellent customer experience.

Blockchain Developer's Guide. Develop smart applications with Blockchain technologies - Ethereum, JavaScript, Hyperledger Fabric, and Corda

Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt, Narayan Prusty

Blockchain applications provide a single-shared ledger to eliminate trust issues involving multiple stakeholders. It is the main technical innovation of Bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for Bitcoin transactions.Blockchain Developer's Guide takes you through the electrifying world of blockchain technology. It begins with the basic design of a blockchain and elaborates concepts, such as Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), tokens, smart contracts, and other related terminologies. You will then explore the components of Ethereum, such as Ether tokens, transactions, and smart contracts that you need to build simple DApps.Blockchain Developer's Guide also explains why you must specifically use Solidity for Ethereum-based projects and lets you explore different blockchains with easy-to-follow examples. You will learn a wide range of concepts - beginning with cryptography in cryptocurrencies and including ether security, mining, and smart contracts. You will learn how to use web sockets and various API services for Ethereum. By the end of this Learning Path, you will be able to build efficient decentralized applications.This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products:• Blockchain Quick Reference by Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt• Building Blockchain Projects by Narayan Prusty

Vulkan Cookbook. Work through recipes to unlock the full potential of the next generation graphics API—Vulkan

Pawel Lapinski

Vulkan is the next generation graphics API released by the Khronos group. It is expected to be the successor to OpenGL and OpenGL ES, which it shares some similarities with such as its cross-platform capabilities, programmed pipeline stages, or nomenclature. Vulkan is a low-level API that gives developers much more control over the hardware, but also adds new responsibilities such as explicit memory and resources management. With it, though, Vulkan is expected to be much faster.This book is your guide to understanding Vulkan through a series of recipes. We start off by teaching you how to create instances in Vulkan and choose the device on which operations will be performed. You will then explore more complex topics such as command buffers, resources and memory management, pipelines, GLSL shaders, render passes, and more. Gradually, the book moves on to teach you advanced rendering techniques, how to draw 3D scenes, and how to improve the performance of your applications.By the end of the book, you will be familiar with the latest advanced techniques implemented with the Vulkan API, which can be used on a wide range of platforms.

Securing Network Infrastructure. Discover practical network security with Nmap and Nessus 7

Sairam Jetty, Sagar Rahalkar

Digitization drives technology today, which is why it’s so important for organizations to design security mechanisms for their network infrastructures. Analyzing vulnerabilities is one of the best ways to secure your network infrastructure.This Learning Path begins by introducing you to the various concepts of network security assessment, workflows, and architectures. You will learn to employ open source tools to perform both active and passive network scanning and use these results to analyze and design a threat model for network security. With a firm understanding of the basics, you will then explore how to use Nessus and Nmap to scan your network for vulnerabilities and open ports and gain back door entry into a network. As you progress through the chapters, you will gain insights into how to carry out various key scanning tasks, including firewall detection, OS detection, and access management to detect vulnerabilities in your network.By the end of this Learning Path, you will be familiar with the tools you need for network scanning and techniques for vulnerability scanning and network protection.This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books:•Network Scanning Cookbook by Sairam Jetty•Network Vulnerability Assessment by Sagar Rahalkar

Hands-On Automated Machine Learning. A beginner's guide to building automated machine learning systems using AutoML and Python

Sibanjan Das, Umit Mert Cakmak

AutoML is designed to automate parts of Machine Learning. Readily available AutoML tools are making data science practitioners’ work easy and are received well in the advanced analytics community. Automated Machine Learning covers the necessary foundation needed to create automated machine learning modules and helps you get up to speed with them in the most practical way possible. In this book, you’ll learn how to automate different tasks in the machine learning pipeline such as data preprocessing, feature selection, model training, model optimization, and much more. In addition to this, it demonstrates how you can use the available automation libraries, such as auto-sklearn and MLBox, and create and extend your own custom AutoML components for Machine Learning. By the end of this book, you will have a clearer understanding of the different aspects of automated Machine Learning, and you’ll be able to incorporate automation tasks using practical datasets. You can leverage your learning from this book to implement Machine Learning in your projects and get a step closer to winning various machine learning competitions.