Mastering OpenCV 3. Get hands-on with practical Computer Vision using OpenCV 3 - Second Edition

Shervin Emami, David Millán Escrivá, Daniel Lelis Baggio, Roy Shilkrot, ...

As we become more capable of handling data in every kind, we are becoming more reliant on visual input and what we can do with those self-driving cars, face recognition, and even augmented reality applications and games. This is all powered by Computer Vision.This book will put you straight to work in creating powerful and unique computer vision applications. Each chapter is structured around a central project and deep dives into an important aspect of OpenCV such as facial recognition, image target tracking, making augmented reality applications, the 3D visualization framework, and machine learning. You’ll learn how to make AI that can remember and use neural networks to help your applications learn.By the end of the book, you will have created various working prototypes with the projects in the book and will be well versed with the new features of OpenCV3.

FreeSWITCH 1.8. Get to grips with VoIP and WebRTC communication and quickly build robust telephony systems with FreeSWITCH

Anthony Minessale II, Giovanni Maruzzelli

FreeSWITCH is an open source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat-driven products, scaling from a soft-phone to a PBX and even up to an enterprise-class soft-switch. This book introduces FreeSWITCH to IT professionals who want to build their own telephony system.This book starts with a brief introduction to the latest version of FreeSWITCH. We then move on to the fundamentals and the new features added in version 1.6, showing you how to set up a basic system so you can make and receive phone calls, make calls between extensions, and utilize basic PBX functionality.Once you have a basic system in place, we’ll show you how to add more and more functionalities to it. You’ll learn to deploy the features on the system using unique techniques and tips to make it work better.Also, there are changes in the security-related components, which will affect the content in the book, so we will make that intact with the latest version. There are new support libraries introduced, such as SQLite, OpenSS, and more, which will make FreeSWITCH more efficient and add more functions to it. We’ll cover these in the new edition to make it more appealing for you.

Practical Site Reliability Engineering. Automate the process of designing, developing, and delivering highly reliable apps and services with SRE

Pethuru Raj Chelliah, Shreyash Naithani, Shailender Singh

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is being touted as the most competent paradigm in establishing and ensuring next-generation high-quality software solutions.This book starts by introducing you to the SRE paradigm and covers the need for highly reliable IT platforms and infrastructures. As you make your way through the next set of chapters, you will learn to develop microservices using Spring Boot and make use of RESTful frameworks. You will also learn about GitHub for deployment, containerization, and Docker containers. Practical Site Reliability Engineering teaches you to set up and sustain containerized cloud environments, and also covers architectural and design patterns and reliability implementation techniques such as reactive programming, and languages such as Ballerina and Rust. In the concluding chapters, you will get well-versed with service mesh solutions such as Istio and Linkerd, and understand service resilience test practices, API gateways, and edge/fog computing.By the end of this book, you will have gained experience on working with SRE concepts and be able to deliver highly reliable apps and services.

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.

Learning PowerShell DSC. Automate deployment and configuration of your servers - Second Edition

James Pogran

The main goal of this book is to teach you to configure, deploy, and manage your system using the new features of PowerShell v5/v6 DSC.This book begins with the basics of PowerShell Desired State Configuration, covering its architecture and components. It familiarizes you with the set of Windows PowerShell language extensions and new Windows PowerShell commands that make up DSC. Then it helps you create DSC custom resources and work with DSC configurations with the help of practical examples. Finally, it describes how to deploy configuration data using PowerShell DSC. Throughout this book, we will be focusing on concepts such as building configurations with parameters, the local configuration manager, and testing and restoring configurations using PowerShell DSC.By the end of the book, you will be able to deploy a real-world application end-to-end and will be familiar enough with the powerful Desired State Configuration platform to achieve continuous delivery and efficiently and easily manage and deploy data for systems.

Hands-On Design Patterns with Delphi. Build applications using idiomatic, extensible, and concurrent design patterns in Delphi

Primož Gabrijelčič

Design patterns have proven to be the go-to solution for many common programming scenarios. This book focuses on design patterns applied to the Delphi language. The book will provide you with insights into the language and its capabilities of a runtime library.You'll start by exploring a variety of design patterns and understanding them through real-world examples. This will entail a short explanation of the concept of design patterns and the original set of the 'Gang of Four' patterns, which will help you in structuring your designs efficiently. Next, you'll cover the most important 'anti-patterns' (essentially bad software development practices) to aid you in steering clear of problems during programming. You'll then learn about the eight most important patterns for each creational, structural, and behavioral type. After this, you'll be introduced to the concept of 'concurrency' patterns, which are design patterns specifically related to multithreading and parallel computation. These will enable you to develop and improve an interface between items and harmonize shared memories within threads. Toward the concluding chapters, you'll explore design patterns specific to program design and other categories of patterns that do not fall under the 'design' umbrella.By the end of this book, you'll be able to address common design problems encountered while developing applications and feel confident while building scalable projects.

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.

Hands-On Machine Learning on Google Cloud Platform. Implementing smart and efficient analytics using Cloud ML Engine

Giuseppe Ciaburro, V Kishore Ayyadevara, Alexis Perrier

Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine combines the services of Google Cloud Platform with the power and flexibility of TensorFlow. With this book, you will not only learn to build and train different complexities of machine learning models at scale but also host them in the cloud to make predictions.This book is focused on making the most of the Google Machine Learning Platform for large datasets and complex problems. You will learn from scratch how to create powerful machine learning based applications for a wide variety of problems by leveraging different data services from the Google Cloud Platform. Applications include NLP, Speech to text, Reinforcement learning, Time series, recommender systems, image classification, video content inference and many other. We will implement a wide variety of deep learning use cases and also make extensive use of data related services comprising the Google Cloud Platform ecosystem such as Firebase, Storage APIs, Datalab and so forth. This will enable you to integrate Machine Learning and data processing features into your web and mobile applications.By the end of this book, you will know the main difficulties that you may encounter and get appropriate strategies to overcome these difficulties and build efficient systems.