Sakai CLE Courseware Management: The Official Guide. Take your e-learning, research, and collaboration experience to the next level

Alan Mark Berg, Ian Dolphin, Sakai Foundation, Sakai Foundation (Project)

Sakai is a Collaboration and Learning environment that provides the means to manage users, courses, instructors, and facilities, as well as a spectrum of tools including assessment, grading, and messaging. Sakai is loaded with many handy features and tools, which make it uniquely the Learning system of the present as well as the future.This book is the officially endorsed Sakai guide and is an update to the previous book, Sakai Courseware Management: The Official Guide. From setting up and running Sakai for the first time to creatively using its tools and features, this book delivers everything you need to know.Written by Alan Berg, a Sakai fellow and former Quality Assurance Director of the Sakai Foundation and Ian Dolphin the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation with significant contributions from the Sakai community, Sakai CLE Courseware Management: The Official Guide is a comprehensive study of how Sakai CLE should be used, managed, and maintained, with real world examples and practical explanations.The book opens with an overview of Sakai, its history and how to set up a demonstration version. Next, the underlying structures and tools are described. In using Sakai for Teaching and Collaboration, there is a detailed discussion of how to structure online courses for teaching and collaboration between groups of students, from creating course sites to understanding their use in different organizations around the world.

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 RStudio - Develop, Communicate, and Collaborate with R. Harness the power of RStudio to create web applications, R packages, markdown reports and pretty data visualizations

Homer White, Julian Hillebrand, Maximilian H. Nierhoff

RStudio helps you to manage small to large projects by giving you a multi-functional integrated development environment, combined with the power and flexibility of the R programming language, which is becoming the bridge language of data science for developers and analyst worldwide. Mastering the use of RStudio will help you to solve real-world data problems.This book begins by guiding you through the installation of RStudio and explaining the user interface step by step. From there, the next logical step is to use this knowledge to improve your data analysis workflow. We will do this by building up our toolbox to create interactive reports and graphs or even web applications with Shiny. To collaborate with others, we will explore how to use Git and GitHub and how to build your own packages to ensure top quality results. Finally, we put it all together in an interactive dashboard written with R.

Unity 3D Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide. A seat-of-your-pants manual for building fun, groovy little games quickly

Ryan Henson Creighton

Beginner game developers are wonderfully optimistic, passionate, and ambitious. But that ambition is often dangerous! Too often, budding indie developers and hobbyists bite off more than they can chew. Some of the most popular games in recent memory – Doodle Jump, Paper Toss, and Canabalt, to name a few – have been fun, simple games that have delighted players and delivered big profits to their creators. This is the perfect climate for new game developers to succeed by creating simple games with Unity 3D, starting today.This book starts you off on the right foot, emphasizing small, simple game ideas and playable projects that you can actually finish. The complexity of the games increases gradually as we progress through the chapters. The chosen examples help you learn a wide variety of game development techniques. With this understanding of Unity 3D and bite-sized bits of programming, you can make your own mark on the game industry by finishing fun, simple games.This book shows you how to build crucial game elements that you can reuse and re-skin in many different games, using the phenomenal (and free!) Unity 3D game engine. It initiates you into indie game culture by teaching you how to make your own small, simple games using Unity3D and some gentle, easy-to-understand code. It will help you turn a rudimentary keep-up game into a madcap race through hospital hallways to rush a still-beating heart to the transplant ward, program a complete 2D game using Unity's User Interface controls, put a dramatic love story spin on a simple catch game, and turn that around into a classic space shooter with spectacular explosions and pew sounds! By the time you're finished, you'll have learned to develop a number of important pieces to create your own games that focus in on that small, singular piece of joy that makes games fun.

Developing Multi-Platform Apps with Visual Studio Code. Get up and running with VS Code by building multi-platform, cloud-native, and microservices-based apps

Ovais Mehboob Ahmed Khan, Khusro Habib, Chris Dias

Microsoft Visual Studio Code is a powerful, lightweight code editor for modern web and cloud development. It is a source code editor that can be used with a variety of programming languages, which works on multiple platforms such as Linux, Windows, and macOS. This book provides extensive coverage of the tools, functionalities, and extensions available within the VS Code environment that will help you build multi-platform apps with ease.You’ll start with the installation of VS Code and learn about various tools and features that are essential for development. Progressing through the chapters, you'll explore the user interface while understanding tips and tricks for increasing productivity. Next, you’ll delve into VS Code extensions and discover how they can make life easier for developers. Later, the book shows you how to develop a sample application with different programming languages, tools, and runtimes to display how VS code can be used effectively for development, before helping you get to grips with source code version management and deployment on Azure with VS Code. Finally, you’ll build on your skills by focusing on remote development with VS Code.By the end of this book, you’ll have the knowledge you need to use Visual Studio Code as your primary tool for software development.

Test-Driven Development with Java. Create higher-quality software by writing tests first with SOLID and hexagonal architecture

Alan Mellor

Test-driven development enables developers to craft well-designed code and prevent defects. It’s a simple yet powerful tool that helps you focus on your code design, while automatically checking that your code works correctly. Mastering TDD will enable you to effectively utilize design patterns and become a proficient software architect.The book begins by explaining the basics of good code and bad code, bursting common myths, and why Test-driven development is crucial. You’ll then gradually move toward building a sample application using TDD, where you’ll apply the two key rhythms -- red, green, refactor and arrange, act, assert. Next, you’ll learn how to bring external systems such as databases under control by using dependency inversion and test doubles. As you advance, you’ll delve into advanced design techniques such as SOLID patterns, refactoring, and hexagonal architecture. You’ll also balance your use of fast, repeatable unit tests against integration tests using the test pyramid as a guide. The concluding chapters will show you how to implement TDD in real-world use cases and scenarios and develop a modern REST microservice backed by a Postgres database in Java 17.By the end of this book, you’ll be thinking differently about how you design code for simplicity and how correctness can be baked in as you go.

WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials. Create your own powerful, interactive plugins to extend and add features to your WordPress site

Everett Griffiths, Brian Bondari, Matt Mullenweg

WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for building blogs and general websites. By learning how to develop and integrate your own plugins, you can add functionality and extend WordPress in any way imaginable. By tapping into the additional power and functionality that plugins provide, you can make your site easier to administer, add new features, or even alter the very nature of how WordPress works. Covering WordPress version 3, this book makes it super easy for you to build a variety of plugins.WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials is a practical hands-on tutorial for learning how to create your own plugins for WordPress. Using best coding practices, this book will walk you through the design and creation of a variety of original plugins.WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials focuses on teaching you all aspects of modern WordPress development. The book uses real and published WordPress plugins and follows their creation from the idea to the finishing touches in a series of easy-to-follow and informative steps. You will discover how to deconstruct an existing plugin, use the WordPress API in typical scenarios, hook into the database, version your code with SVN, and deploy your new plugin to the world.Each new chapter introduces different features of WordPress and how to put them to good use, allowing you to gradually advance your knowledge. WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials is packed with information, tips, and examples that will help you gain comfort and confidence in your ability to harness and extend the power of WordPress via plugins.

YARN Essentials. A comprehensive, hands-on guide to install, administer, and configure settings in YARN

Amol Fasale, Nirmal Kumar