Blockchain for Decision Makers. A systematic guide to using blockchain for improving your business

Romain Tormen

In addition to cryptocurrencies, blockchain-based apps are being developed in different industries such as banking, supply chain, and healthcare to achieve digital transformation and enhance user experience. Blockchain is not only about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, but also about different technologies such as peer-to-peer networks, consensus mechanisms, and cryptography. These technologies together help sustain trustless environments in which digital value can be transferred between individuals without intermediaries.This book will help you understand the basics of blockchain such as consensus protocols, decentralized applications, and tokenization. You'll focus on how blockchain is used today in different industries and the technological challenges faced while implementing a blockchain strategy. The book also enables you, as a decision maker, to understand blockchain from a technical perspective and evaluate its applicability in your business. Finally, you'll get to grips with blockchain frameworks such as Hyperledger and Quorum and their usability.By the end of this book, you'll have learned about the current use cases of blockchain and be able to implement a blockchain strategy on your own.

Professional Image Editing Made Easy with Affinity Photo. Apply Affinity Photo fundamentals to your workflows to edit, enhance, and create great images

Jeremy Hazel

In this book, you’ll explore the Affinity Photo program through practice-based learning as you make popular photo edits, learning the tools and techniques in conjunction with the workflow concept. Instead of comprehensive description of the tools, you’ll learn through practical application and understand why they work, not just how they work. This is neither a technical manual nor a workbook but a project-based hybrid approach that provides a deeper understanding of how to use each tool to achieve your goal.Starting with the fundamentals of navigating the interface, understanding layers, and making your first edit, this Affinity Photo book gradually increases the complexity of projects. You’ll go from single-layer edits, composites, and RAW development to putting together a complex composition using the tools that you've learned along the way. Additionally, you’ll learn the best practices used by expert photo editors for a flawless finish.By the end of this book, you’ll have a good body of work, be able to evaluate the edits you want to make, and achieve desired results with Affinity Photo.

Bash Shell Scripting for Pentesters. Master the art of command-line exploitation and enhance your penetration testing workflows

Steve Campbell, David Kennedy

Bash shell scripting is essential for penetration testing because it’s versatile and efficient and integrates thoroughly with the Unix-based systems commonly used in cybersecurity assessments. In this book, the author leverages his decades of experience in IT and pentesting to help you automate repetitive tasks, rapidly analyze data, and craft sophisticated exploits, boosting your effectiveness and productivity.You’ll get to grips with Bash basics, set up a hacking environment, and create basic scripts, before exploring file management, text processing, and manipulation. The chapters will guide you through advanced topics such as networking, parallel processing, and regular expressions. From there, the book will move on to practical applications, walking you through reconnaissance, web application and infrastructure pentesting, privilege escalation, persistence, and pivoting, all using Bash scripting. You’ll also get a solid understanding of advanced topics, including evasion and obfuscation tactics, integrating AI into penetration testing workflows, and implementing DevSecOps practices.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with Bash shell scripting techniques tailored to penetration testing scenarios.

Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology. Take your data warehousing and business intelligence to the next level with this practical guide to Oracle Database 11g. Packed with illustrations, tips, and examples, it has over 80 advanced recipes to fine-tune your skills and knowledge

John Heaton

Oracle Database 11g is a comprehensive database platform for data warehousing and business intelligence that combines industry-leading scalability and performance, deeply-integrated analytics, and embedded integration and data-quality all in a single platform running on a reliable, low-cost grid infrastructure. This book steps through the lifecycle of building a data warehouse with key tips and techniques along the way.Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology outlines the key ways to effectively use Oracle technology to deliver your business intelligence solution. This is a practical guide starting with key recipes for project management then moving onto project delivery.Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology is a practical guide for performing key steps and functions on your project. This book starts with setting the foundation for a highly repeatable efficient project management approach by assessing your current methodology to see how suitable it is for a business intelligence program. We also learn to set up the project delivery phases to consistently estimate the effort for a project. Along the way we learn to create blueprints for the business intelligence solution that help to connect and map out the destination of the solution. We then move on to analyze requirements, sources, and data. Finally we learn to secure the data as it is an important asset within the organization and needs to be secured efficiently and effectively.

Hudson 3 Essentials. Here is a book that makes life easier for Java developers or administrators by teaching you how to automate application testing using Hudson 3. Fast-paced and hands-on, the guide covers everything from installation to writing plugins

Lloyd H. Meinholz

Continuous integration (CI) with automated test execution has been widely adopted in recent years. The concept behind CI has changed how companies look at Build Management, Release Management, Deployment Automation, and Test Orchestration. Hudson is a CI solution that provides executives, business managers, software developers, and architects with a better sense of the development progress and code quality of projects throughout their development life cycle.A fast-paced and hands-on introduction to the key features of Hudson 3. You will be introduced to tools that can be used to improve the quality of software development projects. You will also learn how to install and secure Hudson in a variety of IT environments. Staring with a brief introduction to Hudson and how it helps many IT organizations deliver high quality software, Hudson 3 Essentials will show you how Hudson can be installed and deployed in various environments. You will also be guided through the different methods of securing your Hudson installation. Moving on from the basics, you will be introduced to several important Hudson plugins and learn how to extend its functionality by developing your own plugins. You will be shown how Hudson can be used to build different types of applications and how it can deploy a web application to an application server. Finally, you will discover how Hudson can be used to perform automated testing on software applications, and how to generate reports that describe the results.

C# 8 and .NET Core 3 Projects Using Azure. Build professional desktop, mobile, and web applications that meet modern software requirements - Second Edition

Paul Michaels, Dirk Strauss, Jas Rademeyer

.NET Core is a general-purpose, modular, cross-platform, and opensource implementation of .NET. The latest release of .NET Core 3 comes with improved performance and security features, along with support for desktop applications. .NET Core 3 is not only useful for new developers looking to start learning the framework, but also for legacy developers interested in migrating their apps. Updated with the latest features and enhancements, this updated second edition is a step-by-step, project-based guide.The book starts with a brief introduction to the key features of C# 8 and .NET Core 3.You'll learn to work with relational data using Entity Framework Core 3, before understanding how to use ASP.NET Core. As you progress, you’ll discover how you can use .NET Core to create cross-platform applications. Later, the book will show you how to upgrade your old WinForms apps to .NET Core 3. The concluding chapters will then help you use SignalR effectively to add real-time functionality to your applications, before demonstrating how to implement MongoDB in your apps. Finally, you'll delve into serverless computing and how to build microservices using Docker and Kubernetes.By the end of this book, you'll be proficient in developing applications using .NET Core 3.

Generative AI on Google Cloud with LangChain. Design scalable generative AI solutions with Python, LangChain, and Vertex AI on Google Cloud

Leonid Kuligin, Jorge Zaldívar, Maximilian Tschochohei, Harrison Chase

The rapid transformation and enterprise adoption of GenAI has created an urgent demand for developers to quickly build and deploy AI applications that deliver real value. Written by three distinguished Google AI engineers and LangChain contributors who have shaped Google Cloud’s integration with LangChain and implemented AI solutions for Fortune 500 companies, this book bridges the gap between concept and implementation, exploring LangChain and Google Cloud’s enterprise-ready tools for scalable AI solutions.You'll start by exploring the fundamentals of large language models (LLMs) and how LangChain simplifies the development of AI workflows by connecting LLMs with external data and services. This book guides you through using essential tools like the Gemini and PaLM 2 APIs, Vertex AI, and Vertex AI Search to create sophisticated, production-ready GenAI applications. You'll also overcome the context limitations of LLMs by mastering advanced techniques like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and external memory layers.Through practical patterns and real-world examples, you’ll gain everything you need to harness Google Cloud’s AI ecosystem, reducing the time to market while ensuring enterprise scalability. You’ll have the expertise to build robust GenAI applications that can be tailored to solve real-world business challenges.

Unity 2017 Game AI programming. Leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence to program smart entities for your games - Third Edition

Raymundo Barrera

Unity 2017 provides game and app developers with a variety of tools to implement Artificial Intelligence. Leveraging these tools via Unity's API or built-in features allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating your game's worlds and characters. This third edition with Unity will help you break down Artificial Intelligence into simple concepts to give you a fundamental understanding of the topic to build upon. Using a variety of examples, the book then takes those concepts and walks you through actual implementations designed to highlight key concepts, and features related to game AI in Unity 5. Further on you will learn to distinguish the state machine pattern and implement one of your own. This is followed by learning how to implement a basic sensory system for your AI agent and coupling it with a Finite State Machine (FSM).Next you'll learn how to use Unity's built-in NavMesh feature and implement your own A* pathfinding system. You will then learn how to implement simple flocks and crowd's dynamics, key AI concepts. Moving on, you will learn how to implement a behavior tree through a game-focused example. Lastly, you'll combine fuzzy logic concepts with state machines and apply all the concepts in the book to build a simple tank game.