Actionable Gamification. Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

Yu-kai Chou

Effective gamification is a combination of game design, game dynamics, user experience, and ROI-driving business implementations. This book explores the interplay between these disciplines and captures the core principles that contribute to a good gamification design.The book starts with an overview of the Octalysis Framework and the 8 Core Drives that can be used to build strategies around the various systems that make games engaging. As the book progresses, each chapter delves deep into a Core Drive, explaining its design and how it should be used. Finally, to apply all the concepts and techniques that you learn throughout, the book contains a brief showcase of using the Octalysis Framework to design a project experience from scratch.After reading this book, you’ll have the knowledge and skills to enable the widespread adoption of good gamification and human-focused design in all types of industries.

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.

Oracle Data Integrator 11g Cookbook. This book is all you need to take your understanding of Oracle Data Integrator to the next level. From initial deployment right through to esoteric techniques, the task-based approach will enhance your expertise effortlessly

Christophe Dupupet, Peter Boyd-Bowman, Julien Testut, Denis Gray

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is Oracle's strategic data integration platform for high-speed data transformation and movement between different systems. From high-volume batches, to SOA-enabled data services, to trickle operations, ODI is a cutting-edge platform that offers heterogeneous connectivity, enterprise-level deployment, and strong administrative, diagnostic, and management capabilities.Oracle Data Integrator 11g Cookbook will take you on a journey past your first steps with ODI to a new level of proficiency, lifting the cover on many of the internals of the product to help you better leverage the most advanced features.The first part of this book will focus on the administrative tasks required for a successful deployment, moving on to showing you how to best leverage Knowledge Modules with explanations of their internals and focus on specific examples. Next we will look into some advanced coding techniques for interfaces, packages, models, and a focus on XML. Finally the book will lift the cover on web services as well as the ODI SDK, along with additional advanced techniques that may be unknown to many users.Throughout Oracle Data Integrator 11g Cookbook, the authors convey real-world advice and best practices learned from their extensive hands-on experience.

Puppet 4 Essentials. Acquire skills to manage your IT infrastructure effectively with Puppet - Second Edition

Felix Frank, Martin Alfke

Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control over what you do to each Puppet Agent in a network, and when and how you do it. In this age of digital delivery and ubiquitous Internet presence, it's becoming increasingly important to implement scalable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software, but also the systems that run it. The free Ruby-based tool Puppet has established itself as the most successful solution to manage any IT infrastructure. Ranging from local development environments through complex data center setups to scalable cloud implementations, Puppet allows you to handle them all with a unified approach.Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition gets you started rapidly and intuitively as you’ll put Puppet’s tools to work right away. It will also highlight the changes associated with performance improvements as well as the new language features in Puppet 4. We’ll start with a quick introduction to Puppet to get you managing your IT systems quickly. You will then learn about the Puppet Agent that comes with an all-in-one (AIO) package and can run on multiple systems. Next, we’ll show you the Puppet Server for high-performance communication and passenger packages. As you progress through the book, the innovative structure and approach of Puppet will be explained with powerful use cases. The difficulties that are inherent to a complex and powerful tool will no longer be a problem for you as you discover Puppet's fascinating intricacies.By the end of the book, you will not only know how to use Puppet, but also its companion tools Facter and Hiera, and will be able to leverage the flexibility and expressive power implemented by their tool chain.

BBC Micro:bit in Practice. A hands-on guide to building creative real-life projects with MicroPython and the BBC Micro:bit

Ashwin Pajankar, Abhishek Sharma, Sandeep Saini

This book is a one-stop guide for learning BBC Micro:bit with MicroPython, exploring many hardware components and programming techniques to provide detailed insights into developing practical applications with the Micro:bit. It will also show you how hardware components can be manipulated using a combination of Micro:bit and MicroPython for developing practical projects. BBC Micro:bit in Practice will help you gain a holistic understanding of the BBC Micro:bit platform and MicroPython programming, guiding you through mini projects aimed at developing practical knowledge of circuit design and writing programs. You’ll learn how to write programs for working with built-in LEDs and buttons, interfacing external LEDs, buttons, motors, buzzers, and much more. You’ll also work with built-in radio, speakers, accelerometer, and a compass. You’ll dive into concepts related to the Micro:bit filesystem, interfacing external displays, and working with libraries in detail before exploring sewable circuits and wearable technology.After reading this Micro:bit book, you’ll understand how to apply principles in electronics and MicroPython to create interesting real-life projects from scratch.

JBoss AS 5 Development. Develop, deploy, and secure Java applications on this robust, open source application server

Francesco Marchioni, Jason Savod

JBoss AS is the most used Java application server on the market meeting high standards of reliability, efficiency, and robustness and is used to build powerful and secure Java EE applications. It supports the most important areas of Java Enterprise programming including EJB 3.0, dependency injection, web services, the security framework, and more. Getting started with JBoss application server development can be challenging; however, with the right approach and guidance, you can easily master it and this book promises that.Written in an easy-to-read style, this book will take you from the basics of JBoss ASósuch as installing core components and plug-insóto the skills that will make you a JBoss developer to be reckoned with, covering advanced topics such as developing applications with JBoss Messaging service, JBoss web services, clustered applications, and more.You will learn the necessary steps to install a suitable environment for developing enterprise applications on JBoss AS. Then, your journey will continue through the heart of the application server, explaining how to customize each service for optimal usage. You will learn how to design Enterprise applications using Eclipse and JBoss plug-ins. You will then learn how to enable distributed communication using JMS. Storing and retrieving objects will be made easier using Hibernate. The core section of the book will take you into the programming arena with tested, real-world examples. The example programs have been carefully crafted to be easy to understand and useful as starting points for your applications.This book will kick-start your productivity and help you to master JBoss AS development. The author's experience with JBoss enables him to share insights on JBoss AS development, in a clear and friendly way. By the end of the book, you will have the confidence to apply all the newest programming techniques to your JBoss applications.

Python Machine Learning Cookbook. 100 recipes that teach you how to perform various machine learning tasks in the real world

Prateek Joshi

Machine learning is becoming increasingly pervasive in the modern data-driven world. It is used extensively across many fields such as search engines, robotics, self-driving cars, and more. With this book, you will learn how to perform various machine learning tasks in different environments. We’ll start by exploring a range of real-life scenarios where machine learning can be used, and look at various building blocks. Throughout the book, you’ll use a wide variety of machine learning algorithms to solve real-world problems and use Python to implement these algorithms. You’ll discover how to deal with various types of data and explore the differences between machine learning paradigms such as supervised and unsupervised learning. We also cover a range of regression techniques, classification algorithms, predictive modeling, data visualization techniques, recommendation engines, and more with the help of real-world examples.

Mastering Cross-Platform Development with Xamarin. Master the skills required to steer cross-platform applications from drawing board to app store(s) using Xamarin

Can Bilgin, Miljenko Cvjetko, Paulo Ortins, Robert Hellestrae, ...

The main goal of this book is to equip you with the required know-how to successfully analyze, develop, and manage Xamarin cross-platform projects using the most efficient, robust, and scalable implementation patterns.This book starts with general topics such as memory management, asynchronous programming, local storage, and networking, and later moves onto platform-specific features. During this transition, you will learn about key tools to leverage the patterns described, as well as advanced implementation strategies and features. The book also presents User Interface design and implementation concepts on Android and iOS platforms from a Xamarin and cross-platform perspective, with the goal to create a consistent but native UI experience.Finally, we show you the toolset for application lifecycle management to help you prepare the development pipeline to manage and see cross-platform projects through to public or private release.