Publisher: Packt Publishing
Founded in 2004 in Birmingham, UK, Packt's mission is to help the world put software to work in new ways, through the delivery of effective learning and information services to IT professionals. Working towards that vision, we have published over 6,500 books and videos so far, providing IT professionals with the actionable knowledge they need to get the job done - whether that's specific learning on an emerging technology or optimizing key skills in more established tools. As part of our mission, we have also awarded over $1,000,000 through our Open Source Project Royalty scheme, helping numerous projects become household names along the way.
5385
Ebook
5386
Ebook

Reinforcement Learning Algorithms with Python. Learn, understand, and develop smart algorithms for addressing AI challenges

Andrea Lonza

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular and promising branch of AI that involves making smarter models and agents that can automatically determine ideal behavior based on changing requirements. This book will help you master RL algorithms and understand their implementation as you build self-learning agents.Starting with an introduction to the tools, libraries, and setup needed to work in the RL environment, this book covers the building blocks of RL and delves into value-based methods, such as the application of Q-learning and SARSA algorithms. You'll learn how to use a combination of Q-learning and neural networks to solve complex problems. Furthermore, you'll study the policy gradient methods, TRPO, and PPO, to improve performance and stability, before moving on to the DDPG and TD3 deterministic algorithms. This book also covers how imitation learning techniques work and how Dagger can teach an agent to drive. You'll discover evolutionary strategies and black-box optimization techniques, and see how they can improve RL algorithms. Finally, you'll get to grips with exploration approaches, such as UCB and UCB1, and develop a meta-algorithm called ESBAS.By the end of the book, you'll have worked with key RL algorithms to overcome challenges in real-world applications, and be part of the RL research community.

5387
Ebook

Managing Risks in Digital Transformation. Navigate the modern landscape of digital threats with the help of real-world examples and use cases

Ashish Kumar, Shashank Kumar, Abbas Kudrati, Sarah Armstrong- Smith

With the rapid pace of digital change today, especially since the pandemic sped up digital transformation and technologies, it has become more important than ever to be aware of the unknown risks and the landscape of digital threats. This book highlights various risks and shows how business-as-usual operations carried out by unaware or targeted workers can lead your organization to a regulatory or business risk, which can impact your organization’s reputation and balance sheet.This book is your guide to identifying the topmost risks relevant to your business with a clear roadmap of when to start the risk mitigation process and what your next steps should be. With a focus on the new and emerging risks that remote-working companies are experiencing across diverse industries, you’ll learn how to manage risks by taking advantage of zero trust network architecture and the steps to be taken when smart devices are compromised. Toward the end, you’ll explore various types of AI-powered machines and be ready to make your business future-proof.In a nutshell, this book will direct you on how to identify and mitigate risks that the ever- advancing digital technology has unleashed.

5388
Ebook

WordPress 5 Cookbook. Actionable solutions to common problems when building websites with WordPress

Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake

WordPress has been the most popular content management system (CMS) for many years and is now powering over 30% of all websites globally. With the demand for WordPress development and skilled developers ever-increasing, now is the best time to learn WordPress inside out.This book starts with simple recipes for configuring WordPress and managing basic platform features. You’ll then move on to explore how to install and customize WordPress plugins, widgets, and themes. The next few chapters cover recipes for content and user-management-related topics such as customizing the content display, working with content types, using the new Gutenberg editor, and customizing editorial workflow for building advanced blogs. As you advance, you’ll learn how to use WordPress as an application framework as well as a platform for building e-commerce sites. This WordPress book will also help you optimize your site to maximize visibility on search engines, add interactivity, and build a user community to make the site profitable. Finally, you’ll learn how to maintain a WordPress site smoothly while taking precautions against possible security threats.By the end of the book, you’ll have the tools and skills required to build and maintain modern WordPress websites with the latest technologies and be able to find quick solutions to common WordPress problems.

5389
Ebook
5390
Ebook

Mastering PyTorch. Create and deploy deep learning models from CNNs to multimodal models, LLMs, and beyond - Second Edition

Ashish Ranjan Jha

PyTorch is making it easier than ever before for anyone to build deep learning applications. This PyTorch deep learning book will help you uncover expert techniques to get the most out of your data and build complex neural network models.You’ll build convolutional neural networks for image classification and recurrent neural networks and transformers for sentiment analysis. As you advance, you'll apply deep learning across different domains, such as music, text, and image generation, using generative models, including diffusion models. You'll not only build and train your own deep reinforcement learning models in PyTorch but also learn to optimize model training using multiple CPUs, GPUs, and mixed-precision training. You’ll deploy PyTorch models to production, including mobile devices. Finally, you’ll discover the PyTorch ecosystem and its rich set of libraries. These libraries will add another set of tools to your deep learning toolbelt, teaching you how to use fastai to prototype models and PyTorch Lightning to train models. You’ll discover libraries for AutoML and explainable AI (XAI), create recommendation systems, and build language and vision transformers with Hugging Face.By the end of this book, you'll be able to perform complex deep learning tasks using PyTorch to build smart artificial intelligence models.

5391
Ebook

Swift: Developing iOS Applications. Developing iOS Applications

Jon Hoffman, Andrew J Wagner, Giordano Scalzo

The Swift––Developing iOS Applications course will take you on a journey to become an efficient iOS and OS X developer, with the latest trending topic in town. Right from the basics to the advanced level topics, this course would cover everything in detail. We’ll embark our journey by dividing the learning path into four modules. Each of these modules are a mini course in their own right; and as you complete each one, you’ll gain key skills and be ready for the material in the next module.The first module is like a step-by-step guide to programming in Swift 2. Each topic is separated into compressible sections that are full of practical examples and easy-to-understand explanations. Each section builds on the previous topics, so you can develop a proficient and comprehensive understanding of app development in Swift 2. By the end of this module, you’ll have a basic understanding of Swift 2 and its functionalities.The second module will be the an easy-to-follow guide filled with tutorials to show you how to build real-world apps. The difficulty and complexity level increases chapter by chapter. Each chapter is dedicated to build a new app, beginning from a basic and unstyled app through to a full 3D game. The last two chapters show you how to build a complete client-server e-commerce app right from scratch. By the end of these modules, you’ll be able to build well-designed apps, effectively use AutoLayout, develop videogames, and build server apps.The third and the last module of our course will take an example-based approach where each concept covered is supported by example code to not only give you a good understanding of the concept, but also to demonstrate how to properly implement it.

5392
Ebook

Unity 5.x Game AI Programming Cookbook. Click here to enter text

Jorge Palacios

Unity 5 comes fully packaged with a toolbox of powerful features to help game and app developers create and implement powerful game AI. 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 practical Cookbook covers both essential and niche techniques to help you be able to do that and more.This Cookbook is engineered as your one-stop reference to take your game AI programming to the next level. Get to grips with the essential building blocks of working with an agent, programming movement and navigation in a game environment, and improving your agent's decision making and coordination mechanisms - all through hands-on examples using easily customizable techniques. Discover how to emulate vision and hearing capabilities for your agent, for natural and humanlike AI behaviour, and improve them with the help of graphs. Empower your AI with decision-making functions through programming simple board games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Checkers, and orchestrate agent coordination to get your AIs working together as one.