Practical Game Design. A modern and comprehensive guide to video game design - Second Edition

Adam Kramarzewski, Ennio De Nucci

If you’re in search of a cutting-edge actionable guide to game design, your quest ends here! Immerse yourself in the fundamentals of game design with expert guidance from veterans with decades of game design experience across a variety of genres and platforms.The second edition of this book remains dedicated to its original goal of helping you master the fundamentals of game design in a practical manner with the addition of some of the latest trends in game design and a whole lot of fresh, real-world examples from games of the current generation. This update brings a new chapter on games as a service, explaining the evolving role of the game designer and diving deeper into the design of games that are meant to be played forever. From conceptualizing a game idea, you’ll gradually move on to devising a design plan and adapting solutions from existing games, exploring the craft of producing original game mechanics, and eliminating anticipated design risks through testing. You’ll then be introduced to level design, interactive storytelling, user experience and accessibility.By the end of this game design book, you’ll have learned how to wrap up a game ahead of its release date, work through the challenges of designing free-to-play games and games as a service, and significantly improve their quality through iteration, playtesting, and polishing.

Learning Qlik Sense: The Official Guide. Get the most out of your Qlik Sense investment with the latest insight and guidance direct from the Qlik Sense team - Second Edition

Christopher Ilacqua, QlikTech International AB, Henric Cronström, James Richardson

The intuitive and powerful Qlik Sense visual analytics software allows anyone to engage in data discovery, to explore your data, and find meaningful insights to empower your business. Qlik Sense lets you easily create personalized reports and visualizations and reveal essential connections to show new opportunities from every angle.Written by members of the Qlik Sense team, this book is the official guide from Qlik to understanding and using their powerful new product with fully updated coverage to the latest features of the most modern edition of Qlik Sense. Benefit from the vision behind the development of Qlik Sense and get to grips with how Qlik Sense can empower you as a data discovery consumer. Learn how to create your own applications for Qlik Sense to customize it to meet your personal needs for business intelligence, and how to oversee and administer the Qlik Sense data architecture. Finally, explore utilizing Qlik Sense to uncover essential data, with practical examples on finding and visualizing intelligence for sales figures, human resources information, travel expense tracking, and demographic data discovery.

Raspberry Pi 2 Server Essentials. Transform your Raspberry Pi into a multi-purpose web server that supports your entire multimedia world with this practical and accessible tutorial!

Piotr J Kula

There’s no end to what you can do with a Raspberry Pi – it makes a huge range of tech projects possible. This book shows you how to transform it into a multipurpose web server, able to store and manage resources that lets you build some truly innovative and impressive computing creations. You’ll learn how to use your Raspberry Pi 2 to host a website using a range of different languages, host a game server, store files, and run everything from a media center to a cloud network. If you want to take control of your technological world, start building your own server and find out what’s possible with the Raspberry Pi microcomputer.Begin by getting your Pi set up – follow each step as the book shows you how to prepare a network and configure the additional features that you’ll need to build your projects. Once you’ve done this you’ll dig a little deeper and set up your pi as a file server, making sure it’s built for speed using a range of different tools, including Python, Node.js and ASP.NET. Following this the book shows you how to extend your server to allow you to host games, and stream live HD video before customizing it even further to create a fully-fledged media center.It doesn’t stop there however – the book then dives into the exciting world of the Internet of Things (IoT). You’ll learn how to install Windows IoT onto your Raspberry Pi, the operating system that’s driving embedded software projects all around the world. Once you’ve done this you’ll be ready to explore IoT further, as the book shows you how to use your device to host a cloud network that can form the basis of a wider IoT project.

Sencha Touch Cookbook. Over 100 recipes for creating cross platform rich media HTML5 apps

Ajit Kumar

Sencha touch is a versatile HTML5-based framework for developing mobile web apps that look and feel native on touch screen devices, and with it you can write your code once and deploy it to both iOS and Android saving you both time and money. The Sencha touch cookbook has a comprehensive selection of recipes covering everything from installation right through to HTML5 geo location. The Sencha Touch Cookbook really is your one stop resource for cross platform HTML5 application development. It covers the basics such as setting up an iOS and Android development environment right through to much more complex development issues such as touch gestures, animation, rich media and geo location. Every recipe is practically focused. Maximum action. Minimum theory.

Cassandra 3.x High Availability. Click here to enter text. - Second Edition

Robbie Strickland

Apache Cassandra is a massively scalable, peer-to-peer database designed for 100 percent uptime, with deployments in the tens of thousands of nodes, all supporting petabytes of data. This book offers a practical insight into building highly available, real-world applications using Apache Cassandra.The book starts with the fundamentals, helping you to understand how Apache Cassandra’s architecture allows it to achieve 100 percent uptime when other systems struggle to do so. You’ll get an excellent understanding of data distribution, replication, and Cassandra’s highly tunable consistency model. Then we take an in-depth look at Cassandra's robust support for multiple data centers, and you’ll see how to scale out a cluster. Next, the book explores the domain of application design, with chapters discussing the native driver and data modeling. Lastly, you’ll find out how to steer clear of common anti-patterns and take advantage of Cassandra’s ability to fail gracefully.

Box2D for Flash Games. Create amazing and realistic physics-based Flash games using Box2D with this book and

Erin Catto, Emanuele Feronato

Physics games are getting more and more popular, and Box2D is the best choice if you are looking for a free, stable and robust library to handle physics. With Box2D you can create every kind of 2D physics game, only coding is not the fun part, but the game itself.Box2D for Flash Games will guide you through the process of making a Flash physics game starting from the bare bones and taking you by hand through complex features such as forces, joints and motors. As you are learning, your game will have more and more features, like the physics games you are used to playing.The book analyzes two of the most played physics games, and breaks them down to allow readers to build them from scratch in a step-by-step approach.By the end of the book, you will learn how to create basic primitive bodies as well as complex, compound bodies. Motors will give life to cars, catapults and siege machines firing bullets, while a complete collision management will make your game look even more realistic.If you want to make full Flash games with physics, then Box2D for Flash Games will guide you through the entire process of making a Flash physics game.

Mastering Predictive Analytics with Python. Click here to enter text

Joseph Babcock

The volume, diversity, and speed of data available has never been greater. Powerful machine learning methods can unlock the value in this information by finding complex relationships and unanticipated trends. Using the Python programming language, analysts can use these sophisticated methods to build scalable analytic applications to deliver insights that are of tremendous value to their organizations. In Mastering Predictive Analytics with Python, you will learn the process of turning raw data into powerful insights. Through case studies and code examples using popular open-source Python libraries, this book illustrates the complete development process for analytic applications and how to quickly apply these methods to your own data to create robust and scalable prediction services.Covering a wide range of algorithms for classification, regression, clustering, as well as cutting-edge techniques such as deep learning, this book illustrates not only how these methods work, but how to implement them in practice. You will learn to choose the right approach for your problem and how to develop engaging visualizations to bring the insights of predictive modeling to life

Automate It with Zapier and Generative AI. Harness the power of no-code workflow automation and AI with Zapier to increase business productivity - Second Edition

Kelly Goss, Philip Lakin

Organizations experience significant issues with productivity when dealing with manual and repetitive tasks. Automate it with Zapier, Second edition has been extensively revised on how to analyze your processes and identify repetitive tasks that can be automated between 6000+ cloud-based business applications.It includes all of the newest features in Zapier such as AI functionality using the ChatGPT plugin, drafts, reordering and duplicating steps and paths, sub-folders and version history, as well as built-in apps such as Looping, Sub-Zap, Interfaces, Tables, Transfer, and provides more examples covering a variety of use cases sourced from the Zapier user community.You'll learn how to implement automation in your organization along with its important principles, terminology, and first steps of how to use Zapier. Progressively, you'll learn how to use Zapier’s native functionality and all 27 built-in apps such as Filter, Paths, Formatter, Digest, and Scheduler, to enable you to build multi-step Zaps. You will also discover how to manage your Zapier account effectively, as well as how to troubleshoot technical problems with your workflows, and use the OpenAI integration to automate AI tasks.By the end of this book, you'll be able to automate your manual and repetitive tasks using Zapier depicted through real-life examples.