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.

The Ultimate iOS Interview Playbook. Conquer Swift, frameworks, design patterns, and app architecture for your dream job

Avi Tsadok

As an iOS developer, you must possess a diverse skill set encompassing Swift coding, design knowledge, and mastery of development tools. And while the demand for iOS developers remains high, the competition for landing your dream job has intensified in recent years. Being a skilled iOS developer is no longer enough — acing interviews is now just as essential as having technical expertise.In The Ultimate iOS Interview Playbook, you'll discover innovative ways to stand out as an iOS developer and pass every job interview. It will guide you to build your developer brand and present your skills to potential employers. This comprehensive guide covers over 100 interview questions, from Swift fundamentals and frameworks to complex design patterns and app architecture. You'll learn how to approach coding assessments like a pro and avoid red flags that could hinder your chances of success.Drawing from the author’s experience of interviewing hundreds of iOS developers and having been a candidate themself, this book addresses the challenges of showcasing your skills and knowledge within a limited timeframe.By the end of this book, you'll be ready to excel in any iOS interview, demonstrating your strengths and confidently tackling even the most challenging questions, ultimately paving the way to secure the job you've always wanted.

Learning Linux Shell Scripting. Unleash the power of shell scripts to solve real-world problems by breaking through the practice of writing tedious code

Ganesh Sanjiv Naik

Linux is the one of the most powerful and universally adopted OSes. Shell is a program that gives the user direct interaction with the operating system. Scripts are collections of commands that are stored in a file. The shell can read this file and act on the commands as if they were typed on the keyboard. Shell scripting is used to automate day-to-day administration, and for testing or product development tasks.This book covers Bash, GNU Bourne Again SHell, preparing you to work in the exciting world of Linux shell scripting. We start with an introduction to the Shell environment and explain basic commands used in Shell. Next we move on to check, kill, and control the execution of processes in Linux OS. Further, we teach you about the filter tools available in Linux and explain standard output and standard errors devices.Then we will ensure you understand Shell’s interpretation of commands and get a firmer grasp so you use them in practice. Next, you’ll experience some real-world essentials such as debugging and perform Shell arithmetic fluently. Then you’ll take a step ahead and learn new and advanced topics in Shell scripting, such as starting up a system and customizing a Linux system. Finally, you’ll get to understand the capabilities of scripting and learn about Grep, Stream Editor, and Awk.

Incident Response with Threat Intelligence. Practical insights into developing an incident response capability through intelligence-based threat hunting

Roberto Martinez

With constantly evolving cyber threats, developing a cybersecurity incident response capability to identify and contain threats is indispensable for any organization regardless of its size. This book covers theoretical concepts and a variety of real-life scenarios that will help you to apply these concepts within your organization.Starting with the basics of incident response, the book introduces you to professional practices and advanced concepts for integrating threat hunting and threat intelligence procedures in the identification, contention, and eradication stages of the incident response cycle. As you progress through the chapters, you'll cover the different aspects of developing an incident response program. You'll learn the implementation and use of platforms such as TheHive and ELK and tools for evidence collection such as Velociraptor and KAPE before getting to grips with the integration of frameworks such as Cyber Kill Chain and MITRE ATT&CK for analysis and investigation. You'll also explore methodologies and tools for cyber threat hunting with Sigma and YARA rules.By the end of this book, you'll have learned everything you need to respond to cybersecurity incidents using threat intelligence.

Automated Machine Learning on AWS. Fast-track the development of your production-ready machine learning applications the AWS way

Trenton Potgieter, Jonathan Dahlberg

AWS provides a wide range of solutions to help automate a machine learning workflow with just a few lines of code. With this practical book, you'll learn how to automate a machine learning pipeline using the various AWS services.Automated Machine Learning on AWS begins with a quick overview of what the machine learning pipeline/process looks like and highlights the typical challenges that you may face when building a pipeline. Throughout the book, you'll become well versed with various AWS solutions such as Amazon SageMaker Autopilot, AutoGluon, and AWS Step Functions to automate an end-to-end ML process with the help of hands-on examples. The book will show you how to build, monitor, and execute a CI/CD pipeline for the ML process and how the various CI/CD services within AWS can be applied to a use case with the Cloud Development Kit (CDK). You'll understand what a data-centric ML process is by working with the Amazon Managed Services for Apache Airflow and then build a managed Airflow environment. You'll also cover the key success criteria for an MLSDLC implementation and the process of creating a self-mutating CI/CD pipeline using AWS CDK from the perspective of the platform engineering team.By the end of this AWS book, you'll be able to effectively automate a complete machine learning pipeline and deploy it to production.

Mastering Blockchain Programming with Solidity. Write production-ready smart contracts for Ethereum blockchain with Solidity

Jitendra Chittoda

Solidity is among the most popular and contract-oriented programming languages used for writing decentralized applications (DApps) on Ethereum blockchain. If you’re looking to perfect your skills in writing professional-grade smart contracts using Solidity, this book can help.You will get started with a detailed introduction to blockchain, smart contracts, and Ethereum, while also gaining useful insights into the Solidity programming language. A dedicated section will then take you through the different Ethereum Request for Comments (ERC) standards, including ERC-20, ERC-223, and ERC-721, and demonstrate how you can choose among these standards while writing smart contracts. As you approach later chapters, you will cover the different smart contracts available for use in libraries such as OpenZeppelin. You’ll also learn to use different open source tools to test, review and improve the quality of your code and make it production-ready. Toward the end of this book, you’ll get to grips with techniques such as adding security to smart contracts, and gain insights into various security considerations. By the end of this book, you will have the skills you need to write secure, production-ready smart contracts in Solidity from scratch for decentralized applications on Ethereum blockchain.

Nmap 6: Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook. Want to master Nmap and its scripting engine? Then this book is for you – packed with practical tasks and precise instructions, it’s a comprehensive guide to penetration testing and network monitoring. Security in depth

Paulino Calderon, Gordon Lyon

Nmap is a well known security tool used by penetration testers and system administrators. The Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) has added the possibility to perform additional tasks using the collected host information. Tasks like advanced fingerprinting and service discovery, information gathering, and detection of security vulnerabilities.Nmap 6: Network exploration and security auditing cookbook will help you master Nmap and its scripting engine. You will learn how to use this tool to do a wide variety of practical tasks for pentesting and network monitoring. Finally, after harvesting the power of NSE, you will also learn how to write your own NSE scripts.Nmap 6: Network exploration and security auditing cookbook is a book full of practical knowledge for every security consultant, administrator or enthusiast looking to master Nmap. The book overviews the most important port scanning and host discovery techniques supported by Nmap. You will learn how to detect mis-configurations in web, mail and database servers and also how to implement your own monitoring system. The book also covers tasks for reporting, scanning numerous hosts, vulnerability detection and exploitation, and its strongest aspect; information gathering.