Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming. Add powerful, believable, and fun AI entities in your game with the power of Unity 2018! - Fourth Edition

Dr. Davide Aversa, Aung Sithu Kyaw, Clifford Peters

Developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for game characters in Unity 2018 has never been easier. Unity provides game and app developers with a variety of tools to implement AI, from the basic techniques to cutting-edge machine learning-powered agents. Leveraging these tools via Unity's API or built-in features allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating your game's worlds and characters.This fourth edition with Unity will help you break down AI into simple concepts to give you a fundamental understanding of the topic to build upon. Using a variety of examples, the book then takes those concepts and walks you through actual implementations designed to highlight key concepts and features related to game AI in Unity.Further on, you'll learn how to distinguish the state machine pattern and implement one of your own. This is followed by learning how to implement a basic sensory system for your AI agent and coupling it with a Finite State Machine (FSM).Next, you'll learn how to use Unity's built-in NavMesh feature and implement your own A* pathfinding system. You'll then learn how to implement simple ?ocks and crowd dynamics, which are key AI concepts in Unity. Moving on, you'll learn how to implement a behavior tree through a game-focused example. Lastly, you'll apply all the concepts in the book to build a popular game.

Network Programming with Rust. Build fast and resilient network servers and clients by leveraging Rust's memory-safety and concurrency features

Abhishek Chanda

Rust is low-level enough to provide fine-grained control over memory while providing safety through compile-time validation. This makes it uniquely suitable for writing low-level networking applications.This book is divided into three main parts that will take you on an exciting journey of building a fully functional web server. The book starts with a solid introduction to Rust and essential networking concepts. This will lay a foundation for, and set the tone of, the entire book. In the second part, we will take an in-depth look at using Rust for networking software. From client-server networking using sockets to IPv4/v6, DNS, TCP, UDP, you will also learn about serializing and deserializing data using serde. The book shows how to communicate with REST servers over HTTP. The final part of the book discusses asynchronous network programming using the Tokio stack. Given the importance of security for modern systems, you will see how Rust supports common primitives such as TLS and public-key cryptography.After reading this book, you will be more than confident enough to use Rust to build effective networking software

Apache Spark 2.x Cookbook. Over 70 cloud-ready recipes for distributed Big Data processing and analytics

Rishi Yadav

While Apache Spark 1.x gained a lot of traction and adoption in the early years, Spark 2.x delivers notable improvements in the areas of API, schema awareness, Performance, Structured Streaming, and simplifying building blocks to build better, faster, smarter, and more accessible big data applications. This book uncovers all these features in the form of structured recipes to analyze and mature large and complex sets of data.Starting with installing and configuring Apache Spark with various cluster managers, you will learn to set up development environments. Further on, you will be introduced to working with RDDs, DataFrames and Datasets to operate on schema aware data, and real-time streaming with various sources such as Twitter Stream and Apache Kafka. You will also work through recipes on machine learning, including supervised learning, unsupervised learning & recommendation engines in Spark.Last but not least, the final few chapters delve deeper into the concepts of graph processing using GraphX, securing your implementations, cluster optimization, and troubleshooting.

D3.js 4.x Data Visualization. Learn to visualize your data with JavaScript - Third Edition

Aendrew Rininsland, Swizec Teller

Want to get started with impressive interactive visualizations and implement them in your daily tasks? This book offers the perfect solution-D3.js. It has emerged as the most popular tool for data visualization. This book will teach you how to implement the features of the latest version of D3 while writing JavaScript using the newest tools and techniqueYou will start by setting up the D3 environment and making your first basic bar chart. You will then build stunning SVG and Canvas-based data visualizations while writing testable, extensible code,as accurate and informative as it is visually stimulating. Step-by-step examples walk you through creating, integrating, and debugging different types of visualization and will have you building basic visualizations (such as bar, line, and scatter graphs) in no time.By the end of this book, you will have mastered the techniques necessary to successfully visualize data and will be ready to use D3 to transform any data into an engaging and sophisticated visualization.

Azure Resource Manager Templates Quick Start Guide. Create, deploy, and manage Azure resources with ARM templates using best practices

Ritesh Modi

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are declarations of Azure resources in the JSON format to provision and maintain them using infrastructure as code. This book gives practical solutions and examples for provisioning and managing various Azure services using ARM templates.The book starts with an understanding of infrastructure as code, a refresher on JSON, and then moves on to explain the fundamental concepts of ARM templates. Important concepts like iteration, conditional evaluation, security, usage of expressions, and functions will be covered in detail. You will use linked and nested templates to create modular ARM templates. You will see how to create multiple instances of the same resources, how to nest and link templates, and how to establish dependencies between them. You will also learn about implementing design patterns, secure template design, the unit testing of ARM templates, and adopting best practices.By the end of this book, you will understand the entire life cycle of ARM templates and their testing, and be able to author them for complex deployments.

AWS Lambda Quick Start Guide. Learn how to build and deploy serverless applications on AWS

Markus Klems

AWS Lambda is a part of AWS that lets you run your code without provisioning or managing servers. This enables you to deploy applications and backend services that operate with no upfront cost. This book gets you up to speed on how to build scalable systems and deploy serverless applications with AWS Lambda.The book starts with the fundamental concepts of AWS Lambda, and then teaches you how to combine your applications with other AWS services, such as AmazonAPI Gateway and DynamoDB. This book will also give a quick walk through on how to use the Serverless Framework to build larger applications that can structure code or autogenerate boilerplate code that can be used to get started quickly for increased productivity.Toward the end of the book, you will learn how to write, run, and test Lambda functions using Node.js, Java, Python, and C#.

Neural Networks with Keras Cookbook. Over 70 recipes leveraging deep learning techniques across image, text, audio, and game bots

V Kishore Ayyadevara

This book will take you from the basics of neural networks to advanced implementations of architectures using a recipe-based approach.We will learn about how neural networks work and the impact of various hyper parameters on a network's accuracy along with leveraging neural networks for structured and unstructured data.Later, we will learn how to classify and detect objects in images. We will also learn to use transfer learning for multiple applications, including a self-driving car using Convolutional Neural Networks.We will generate images while leveraging GANs and also by performing image encoding. Additionally, we will perform text analysis using word vector based techniques. Later, we will use Recurrent Neural Networks and LSTM to implement chatbot and Machine Translation systems.Finally, you will learn about transcribing images, audio, and generating captions and also use Deep Q-learning to build an agent that plays Space Invaders game.By the end of this book, you will have developed the skills to choose and customize multiple neural network architectures for various deep learning problems you might encounter.

Mastering Arduino. A project-based approach to electronics, circuits, and programming

Jon Hoffman

Mastering Arduino is an all-in-one guide to getting the most out of your Arduino. This practical, no-nonsense guide teaches you all of the electronics and programming skills that you need to create advanced Arduino projects. This book is packed full of real-world projects for you to practice on, bringing all of the knowledge in the book together and giving you the skills to build your own robot from the examples in this book. The final two chapters discuss wireless technologies and how they can be used in your projects. The book begins with the basics of electronics, making sure that you understand components, circuits, and prototyping before moving on. It then performs the same function for code, getting you into the Arduino IDE and showing you how to connect the Arduino to a computer and run simple projects on your Arduino.Once the basics are out of the way, the next 10 chapters of the book focus on small projects centered around particular components, such as LCD displays, stepper motors, or voice synthesizers. Each of these chapters will get you familiar with the technology involved, how to build with it, how to program it, and how it can be used in your own projects.