Hands-On Azure Digital Twins. A practical guide to building distributed IoT solutions

Alexander Meijers

In today’s world, clients are using more and more IoT sensors to monitor their business processes and assets. Think about collecting information such as pressure in an engine, the temperature, or a light switch being turned on or off in a room. The data collected can be used to create smart solutions for predicting future trends, creating simulations, and drawing insights using visualizations. This makes it beneficial for organizations to make digital twins, which are digital replicas of the real environment, to support these smart solutions.This book will help you understand the concept of digital twins and how it can be implemented using an Azure service called Azure Digital Twins. Starting with the requirements and installation of the Azure Digital Twins service, the book will explain the definition language used for modeling digital twins. From there, you'll go through each step of building digital twins using Azure Digital Twins and learn about the different SDKs and APIs and how to use them with several Azure services. Finally, you'll learn how digital twins can be used in practice with the help of several real-world scenarios.By the end of this book, you'll be confident in building and designing digital twins and integrating them with various Azure services.

Kickstart Modern Android Development with Jetpack and Kotlin. Enhance your applications by integrating Jetpack and applying modern app architectural concepts

Catalin Ghita

With Jetpack libraries, you can build and design high-quality, robust Android apps that have an improved architecture and work consistently across different versions and devices. This book will help you understand how Jetpack allows developers to follow best practices and architectural patterns when building Android apps while also eliminating boilerplate code.Developers working with Android and Kotlin will be able to put their knowledge to work with this condensed practical guide to building apps with the most popular Jetpack libraries, including Jetpack Compose, ViewModel, Hilt, Room, Paging, Lifecycle, and Navigation. You'll get to grips with relevant libraries and architectural patterns, including popular libraries in the Android ecosystem such as Retrofit, Coroutines, and Flow while building modern applications with real-world data.By the end of this Android app development book, you'll have learned how to leverage Jetpack libraries and your knowledge of architectural concepts for building, designing, and testing robust Android applications for various use cases.

Banana Pi Cookbook. Over 25 recipes to build projects and applications for multiple platforms with Banana Pi

Ryad El-Dajani

The Art of Micro Frontends. Build highly scalable, distributed web applications with multiple teams - Second Edition

Florian Rappl, Lothar Schöttner

The organizational pattern of micro frontends allows you to split web applications into multiple parts, where each part can be owned by an autonomous team. Each team can have its own development and deployment life cycle, allowing every part of an application to be shipped in isolation. Following the strategies outlined in this book, you can avoid complexity while increasing resilience for your frontend. This updated second edition will guide you through the patterns available to implement a micro frontend solution. You’ll learn about micro frontends, the different architecture styles, and their areas of use. Then, you’ll learn how to prepare teams for the change to micro frontends, as well as how to adjust the user interface (UI) design and your CSS styles for scalability. Starting with the simplest variants of micro frontend architectures, the book progresses from static approaches to fully dynamic solutions that allow maximum scalability with faster release cycles. In the concluding chapters, you’ll strengthen the security level of your micro frontend solution, while reinforcing your overall knowledge with real-world case studies relating to micro frontends. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to decide whether and how micro frontends should be implemented to achieve high scalability for your web app.

The Complete Coding Interview Guide in Java. An effective guide for aspiring Java developers to ace their programming interviews

Anghel Leonard

Java is one of the most sought-after programming languages in the job market, but cracking the coding interview in this challenging economy might not be easy. This comprehensive guide will help you to tackle various challenges faced in a coding job interview and avoid common interview mistakes, and will ultimately guide you toward landing your job as a Java developer.This book contains two crucial elements of coding interviews - a brief section that will take you through non-technical interview questions, while the more comprehensive part covers over 200 coding interview problems along with their hands-on solutions. This book will help you to develop skills in data structures and algorithms, which technical interviewers look for in a candidate, by solving various problems based on these topics covering a wide range of concepts such as arrays, strings, maps, linked lists, sorting, and searching. You'll find out how to approach a coding interview problem in a structured way that produces faster results. Toward the final chapters, you'll learn to solve tricky questions about concurrency, functional programming, and system scalability.By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to solve Java coding problems commonly used in interviews, and will have developed the confidence to secure your Java-centric dream job.

Learn T-SQL Querying. A guide to developing efficient and elegant T-SQL code - Second Edition

Pedro Lopes, Pam Lahoud

Data professionals seeking to excel in Transact-SQL for Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL Database often lack comprehensive resources. Learn T-SQL Querying second edition focuses on indexing queries and crafting elegant T-SQL code enabling data professionals gain mastery in modern SQL Server versions (2022) and Azure SQL Database. The book covers new topics like logical statement processing flow, data access using indexes, and best practices for tuning T-SQL queries.Starting with query processing fundamentals, the book lays a foundation for writing performant T-SQL queries. You’ll explore the mechanics of the Query Optimizer and Query Execution Plans, learning to analyze execution plans for insights into current performance and scalability. Using dynamic management views (DMVs) and dynamic management functions (DMFs), you’ll build diagnostic queries. The book covers indexing and delves into SQL Server’s built-in tools to expedite resolution of T-SQL query performance and scalability issues. Hands-on examples will guide you to avoid UDF pitfalls and understand features like predicate SARGability, Query Store, and Query Tuning Assistant. By the end of this book, you‘ll have developed the ability to identify query performance bottlenecks, recognize anti-patterns, and avoid pitfalls

iClone 4.31 3D Animation Beginner's Guide. Animate your stories and ideas to create realistic scenes with this movie making application geared towards new and inexperienced film makers, video producers/compositors, vxf artists and 3D artists / designers

M.D. McCallum, Mike D McCallum

Reallusion’s iClone is an animated movie making application that allows hobbyists, machinimators, home-based animators, and professionals to visualize their story or an idea by seeing it in action. Years ago, creating animations and single images would require a team of trained artists to accomplish. Now, iClone real time rending engine empowers its users to instantly view what is loaded into the 3D workspace or preview it as an animation, if you have the precise instructions.The iClone 3D Animation Beginner’s Guide will walk you through the building and animating of a complete scene and several one-off projects. First we create a scene with sky, terrain , water, props and other assets. Then add two characters and manipulate their features and animate their movement. We will also use particles to create the effect of a realistic torch and animate cameras to give different views to the scene. Finally we will see how to quickly import images to enhance the scene with a mountain, barn, and water tank. It will cover some fun stuff such as playing with props, characters, and other scene assets. It will also demonstrate some advanced topics such as screen resolution, formats and codecs but mostly it will deal with doing hands on animation with precise instructions.Starting with a blank project using stock and downloadable assets you will learn to lay out and animate a scene and export that scene to both a single image and a movie. The main project will demonstrate many common and undocumented techniques, while each project introduces and examines tools and techniques for successful and fun animation of ideas or scripts.Each project of the book including the main project is designed to cover the aspects of 3D animation in a manner which anyone with basic computer skills can follow. You will discover the importance of lighting a scene including daytime scenes. The concept of the timeline and key frames will be covered in detail and other topics such as rendering (exporting), character modification and prop placement all have their own sections with step by step instructions followed by an explanation of what just happened. Good animation habits and project basics are stressed throughout the book interspersed with time saving tips and techniques gained from years of experience with iClone.When you have finished The iClone 3D Animation Beginner’s Guide you will have a solid foundation in the basics of iClone by having animated a scene with multiple characters and props that involves dialog and interaction with other characters. You will have the knowledge to create new animation projects to hone your skills, tell your story, educate students or sell your product.

Hands-On Gradient Boosting with XGBoost and scikit-learn. Perform accessible machine learning and extreme gradient boosting with Python

Corey Wade, Kevin Glynn

XGBoost is an industry-proven, open-source software library that provides a gradient boosting framework for scaling billions of data points quickly and efficiently.The book introduces machine learning and XGBoost in scikit-learn before building up to the theory behind gradient boosting. You’ll cover decision trees and analyze bagging in the machine learning context, learning hyperparameters that extend to XGBoost along the way. You’ll build gradient boosting models from scratch and extend gradient boosting to big data while recognizing speed limitations using timers. Details in XGBoost are explored with a focus on speed enhancements and deriving parameters mathematically. With the help of detailed case studies, you’ll practice building and fine-tuning XGBoost classifiers and regressors using scikit-learn and the original Python API. You'll leverage XGBoost hyperparameters to improve scores, correct missing values, scale imbalanced datasets, and fine-tune alternative base learners. Finally, you'll apply advanced XGBoost techniques like building non-correlated ensembles, stacking models, and preparing models for industry deployment using sparse matrices, customized transformers, and pipelines.By the end of the book, you’ll be able to build high-performing machine learning models using XGBoost with minimal errors and maximum speed.