Mastering Adobe Photoshop 2024. Discover the smart way to polish your digital imagery skills by editing professional looking photos

Gary Bradley

Unlock the full potential of Photoshop, the go-to app for content creators, by mastering its complex tools and features. This book, drawing from the award-winning author’s 25+ years of design experience, builds on your existing Photoshop knowledge with proven industry techniques, serving as a launchpad to develop professional skills and transformative personal growth.You’ll fine-tune color and tone in your images with non-destructive adjustment layers and conceal content like backdrops with precise masking techniques for fine details like hair. Working through a series of real-world editing projects, crafting realistic brand mockups and traditional marketing collateral, you’ll learn robust methods for building social media assets in Photoshop, from images to animated GIFs and videos. You’ll also be able to bring your typography to life with styles and effects that are simple to edit and store as preset effects. The final section of the book encapsulates all of your learning to create complex montages using advanced masking and compositing techniques. You’ll have fun elevating your designs with surreal art styles and conceptual imagery using retouching, blending, and liquify filters.By the end of this Adobe Photoshop book, you’ll be equipped to create captivating visuals that leave a lasting impression on your audience.

Joomla! 2.5 Beginner's Guide. Joomla! is the free and easy way to create websites, and this book is written for absolute beginners who want to learn the basics and go beyond. Packed with helpful screenshots and crystal clear instructions

Eric Tiggeler

Joomla! is one of the most popular open-source Content Management Systems, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. Although it's a fun and feature-rich tool, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build a site that meets your needs perfectly. Using this book you can create dynamic, interactive web- sites that perfectly fit your needs.Completely updated for Joomla! 2.5, this practical guide teaches you how to create professional, appealing and extendable websites, whether you want to create a full-featured company or club website or build a personal blog site.The Joomla! Beginner's Guide helps beginners to get started quickly and to get beyond the basics to take full advantage of Joomla!'s powerful features. Completely updated from the first book, real-life examples and tutorials will spark your imagination and show you what kind of professional, contemporary, feature-rich websites any developer can achieve with Joomla!. This book thoroughly covers the concepts behind the software and creates a coherent picture of how the software works. This book is not about what Joomla! can do ñ it's about what you can do using Joomla!.

Creating Games with cocos2d for iPhone 2. Master cocos2d through building nine complete games for the iPhone with this book and

Paul Nygard

Cocos2d for iPhone is a simple (but powerful) 2D framework that makes it easy to create games for the iPhone. There are thousands of games in the App Store already using cocos2d. Game development has never been this approachable and easy to get started.Creating Games with cocos2d for iPhone 2 takes you through the entire process of designing and building nine complete games for the iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad using cocos2d 2.0. The projects start simply and gradually increase in complexity, building on the lessons learned in previous chapters. Good design practices are emphasized throughout.From a simple match game to an endless runner, you will learn how to build a wide variety of game styles.You will learn how to implement animation, actions, create artificial randomness, use the Box2D physics engine, create tile maps, and even use Bluetooth to play between two devices.Creating games with cocos2d for iPhone 2 will take your game building skills to the next level.

Splunk 7 Essentials. Demystify machine data by leveraging datasets, building reports, and sharing powerful insights - Third Edition

J-P Contreras, Steven Koelpin, Erickson Delgado, Betsy Page Sigman

Splunk is a search, reporting, and analytics software platform for machine data, which has an ever-growing market adoption rate. More organizations than ever are adopting Splunk to make informed decisions in areas such as IT operations, information security, and the Internet of Things.The first two chapters of the book will get you started with a simple Splunkinstallation and set up of a sample machine data generator, called Eventgen.After this, you will learn to create various reports, dashboards, and alerts. You willalso explore Splunk's Pivot functionality to model data for business users. Youwill then have the opportunity to test-drive Splunk's powerful HTTP Event Collector. After covering the core Splunk functionality, you'll be provided with some real-world best practices for using Splunk, and information on how to build upon what you've learned in this book.Throughout the book, there will be additional comments and best practicerecommendations from a member of the SplunkTrust Community, calledTips from the Fez.

Android Wearable Programming. Expand on your Android development capabilities by building applications for Android Wear

Steven F. Daniel

GameMaker Cookbook. Over 50 hands-on recipes to help you build exhilarating games using the robust GameMaker system

Brandon Gardiner, Julián Rojas Millán

GameMaker: Studio started off as a tool capable of creating simple games using a drag-and-drop interface. Since then, it has grown to become a powerful instrument to make release-ready games for PC, Mac, mobile devices, and even current-gen consoles. GameMaker is designed to allow its users to develop games without having to learn any of the complex programming languages such as C++ or Java. It also allows redistribution across multiple platforms.This book teaches you to harness GameMaker: Studio’s full potential and take your game development to new heights.It begins by covering the basics and lays a solid foundation for advanced GameMaker concepts. Moving on, it covers topics such as controls, physics, and advanced movement, employing a strategic approach to the learning curve. The book concludes by providing insights into complex concepts such as the GUI, menus, save system, lighting, particles, and VFX.By the end of the book, you will be able to design games using GameMaker: Studio and implement the same techniques in other games you intend to design.

Practical XMPP. Click here to enter text

Steven Watkin, David Koelle

XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) is a messaging protocol that enables communication between two or more devices via the Internet.With this book, developers will learn about the fundamentals of XMPP, be able to work with the core functionality both server-side and in the browser, as well as starting to explore several of the protocol extensions. You will not only have a solid grasp of XMPP and how it works, but will also be able to use the protocol to build real-world applications that utilize the power of XMPP. By the end of this book, you will know more about networking applications in general, and have a good understanding of how to extend XMPP, as well as using it in sample applications.

Tableau Prep Cookbook. Use Tableau Prep to clean, combine, and transform your data for analysis

Hendrik Kleine

Tableau Prep is a tool in the Tableau software suite, created specifically to develop data pipelines. This book will describe, in detail, a variety of scenarios that you can apply in your environment for developing, publishing, and maintaining complex Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) data pipelines.The book starts by showing you how to set up Tableau Prep Builder. You’ll learn how to obtain data from various data sources, including files, databases, and Tableau Extracts. Next, the book demonstrates how to perform data cleaning and data aggregation in Tableau Prep Builder. You’ll also gain an understanding of Tableau Prep Builder and how you can leverage it to create data pipelines that prepare your data for downstream analytics processes, including reporting and dashboard creation in Tableau. As part of a Tableau Prep flow, you’ll also explore how to use R and Python to implement data science components inside a data pipeline. In the final chapter, you’ll apply the knowledge you’ve gained to build two use cases from scratch, including a data flow for a retail store to prepare a robust dataset using multiple disparate sources and a data flow for a call center to perform ad hoc data analysis.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to create, run, and publish Tableau Prep flows and implement solutions to common problems in data pipelines.