Gamification for Product Excellence. Make your product stand out with higher user engagement, retention, and innovation

Mike Hyzy, Bret Wardle, Gabe Zichermann

Are you trying to build a product that your audience loves to use? Game mechanics and psychology have been used for decades to increase engagement, convert users to buyers, and increase audience retention. Learning when and where to implement these tools can take your product from the middle of the pack to a must-have!This book begins by helping you get a clear understanding of gamification, its key concepts, and how product managers can leverage it to drive user engagement in non-game scenarios. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll learn different gamification frameworks, mechanics, and elements with structured ways to implement them while designing a successful gamification strategy tailored to a business case. You'll get a chance to implement and test the designed strategy prototype with the users for feedback. You’ll also discover how to sell your strategy to stakeholders to get full buy-in from the top down, along with how to gamify your product development process to drive innovation, engagement, and motivation.By the end of this book, you'll be primed to harness the power of gamification, and will have benefited from proven case studies, best practices, and tips, ensuring you are well-equipped to apply gamification principles to your work as a product development professional.

Learning Unreal Engine iOS Game Development. Explore the powerful features of UE4 and build a complete Unreal game with this accessible and practical iOS game development guide

Muhammad A.Moniem

Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook. Solve real-world Magento sales problems with a collection of simple but effective recipes

Roy Rubin, William Rice, William Rice

Magento is a feature-rich, professional open source e-commerce solution that offers users complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Although Magento provides users with the power to create dynamic e-commerce sites, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and create sites that are tailored to your unique business needs.This book gives you a hands-on experience on Magento, helping you increase your revenue by implementing proven sales tactics on your Magento site.This book contains techniques to help you with each stage of selling to your customers: attracting visitors, driving them to your product pages, making the sale, increasing sales, engaging your customers, and more. It contains a powerful mix of techniques for increasing sales in your online storefront. Over thirty of the techniques are short and stand alone. A few are designed to be used together, such as the seven techniques in the chapter on creating an international storefront. Some techniques make creative use of Magento’s standard features. A few techniques combine Magento with other tools, such as social networking sites. All the techniques are explained in clear, step-by-step directions, with many screenshots. The book uses an example site for each technique, so that you can see exactly how it will affect your storefront. You can jump into the book at any point, or, work through it from beginning to end.

Mastering Adobe Captivate 6. Take your e-learning content to the next level with this fantastic guide to mastering Adobe Captivate. You\'ll learn by completing three sample projects that cover everything. If you can use Windows or Mac you can do this course

Damien Bruyndonckx

Adobe Captivate is the industry-leading solution for authoring E-learning content. With adobe Captivate one can capture the on-screen action, enhance e-Learning projects, insert SCORM and AICC-compliant quizzes and then, publish your work in various formats for easy deployment on virtually any desktop and mobile device. Mastering Adobe Captivate 6 is a comprehensive guide to creating SCORM-compliant demonstrations, simulations and quizzes with Adobe Captivate. The sample projects demonstrate each and every feature of Adobe Captivate giving you the expertise you need to create and deploy your own professionalquality e-learning courses. Mastering Adobe Captivate 6 will guide you through the creation of three e-learning projects including a demonstration, a simulation and a SCORM-compliant quiz. The first part of the book will drive you through the main three steps of the Captivate production process. In the first step, we will use the powerful capture engine of Captivate to generate the needed slides and screenshots. In the second step, we will enhance our slides and screenshots using the objects provided by Captivate. These objects include animations, interactions, videos and more. In the third step, we will make our project available to the outside world by publishing it in various formats including Adobe Flash PDF, video, and even HTML 5. The second part of the book will focus on the advanced tools of Captivate. These tools include the questions slides that make up a quiz, SCORM and AICC compliance, localization of your e-Learning content and widgets among others. In the last chapter, you we will unleash the true power of Captivate by using the variables and the advanced actions to create a unique e-Learning experience.

BeagleBone Black Cookbook. Over 60 recipes and solutions for inventors, makers, and budding engineers to create projects using the BeagleBone Black

Charles A. Hamilton, Jason Kridner

There are many single-board controllers and computers such as Arduino, Udoo, or Raspberry Pi, which can be used to create electronic prototypes on circuit boards. However, when it comes to creating more advanced projects, BeagleBone Black provides a sophisticated alternative. Mastering the BeagleBone Black enables you to combine it with sensors and LEDs, add buttons, and marry it to a variety of add-on boards. You can transform this tiny device into the brain for an embedded application or an endless variety of electronic inventions and prototypes.With dozens of how-tos, this book kicks off with the basic steps for setting up and running the BeagleBone Black for the first time, from connecting the necessary hardware and using the command line with Linux commands to installing new software and controlling your system remotely. Following these recipes, more advanced examples take you through scripting, debugging, and working with software source files, eventually working with the Linux kernel. Subsequently, you will learn how to exploit the board's real-time functions. We will then discover exciting methods for using sound and video with the system before marching forward into an exploration of recipes for building Internet of Things projects. Finally, the book finishes with a dramatic arc upward into outer space, when you explore ways to build projects for tracking and monitoring satellites.

Creative Motion Mastery with Adobe After Effects. Learn the ins and outs of motion graphics, post-production, rotoscoping, and VFX

Vishu Aggarwal

Visual effects and motion graphics are everywhere, shaping the film, TV, games, websites, and application landscape. Navigating a field this complex and ever-expanding demands more than mere familiarity with tools; you need to stand out to get ahead. Creative Motion Mastery with Adobe After Effects is the definitive guide that not only equips you with the essential skills to distinguish yourself, but also takes you through real projects that you can add to your portfolio.Guided by a hands-on learning approach, you'll master the UI, workflow, and diverse projects such as text animation, shape layers, and rotoscoping. With this newfound knowledge, you’ll take your graphic design and post-production skills to the next level using chroma keying, particle simulations, and 2D and 3D tracking. You’ll progress faster than someone taking a formal course in Adobe After Effects! And it’s not all about creating; you’ll import graphics from Illustrator and Photoshop and apply post-production effects to give them a new life. Finally, you’ll discover how seamlessly you can export and manage your projects, ensuring end-to-end coverage of all you need.By the end of the book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of Adobe After Effects, equipped with the skills and practice you need to propel your career in graphic design.

Mastering C# and .NET Framework. .NET Under the hood

Marino Posadas

Mastering C# and .NET Framework will take you in to the depths of C# 6.0/7.0 and .NET 4.6, so you can understand how the platform works when it runs your code, and how you can use this knowledge to write efficient applications. Take full advantage of the new revolution in .NET development, including open source status and cross-platform capability, and get to grips with the architectural changes of CoreCLR.Start with how the CLR executes code, and discover the niche and advanced aspects of C# programming – from delegates and generics, through to asynchronous programming. Run through new forms of type declarations and assignments, source code callers, static using syntax, auto-property initializers, dictionary initializers, null conditional operators, and many others. Then unlock the true potential of the .NET platform. Learn how to write OWASP-compliant applications, how to properly implement design patterns in C#, and how to follow the general SOLID principles and its implementations in C# code.We finish by focusing on tips and tricks that you'll need to get the most from C# and .NET.This book also covers .NET Core 1.1 concepts as per the latest RTM release in the last chapter.

Mastering JavaScript Functional Programming. Write clean, robust, and maintainable web and server code using functional JavaScript and TypeScript - Third Edition

Federico Kereki

Functional programming is a programming paradigm that uses functions for developing software. This book is filled with examples that enable you to leverage the latest JavaScript and TypeScript versions to produce modern and clean code, as well as teach you to how apply functional programming techniques to develop more efficient algorithms, write more concise code, and simplify unit testing.This book provides comprehensive coverage of the major topics in functional programming to produce shorter, clearer, and testable programs. You’ll begin by getting to grips with writing and testing pure functions, reducing side effects, as well as other key features to make your applications functional in nature. The book specifically explores techniques to simplify coding, apply recursion, perform high-level coding, learn ways to achieve immutability, implement design patterns, and work with data types.By the end of this book, you’ll have developed the practical programming skills needed to confidently enhance your applications by adding functional programming to wherever it’s most suitable.