Moodle 2.0 First Look. Discover what's new in Moodle 2.0, how the new features work, and how it will impact you

Mary Cooch, Moodle Trust

Moodle is currently the world's most popular E-learning platform. The long-awaited second version of Moodle is now available and brings with it greatly improved functionality. If you are planning to upgrade your site to Moodle 2.0 and want to be up-to-date with the latest developments, then this book is for you.This book takes an in-depth look at all of the major new features in Moodle 2.0 and how it differs from previous Moodle versions. It highlights changes to the standard installation and explains the new features with clear screenshots, so you can quickly take full advantage of Moodle 2.0. It also assists you in upgrading your site to Moodle 2.0, and will give you the confidence to make the move up to Moodle 2.0, either as an administrator or a course teacher.With its step-by-step introduction to the new features of Moodle 2.0, this book will leave you confident and keen to get your own courses up and running on Moodle 2.0. It will take you on a journey from basic navigation to advanced administration, looking at the changes in resource management and activity setup along the way. It will show you new ways tutors and students can control the pace of their learning and introduce you to the numerous possibilities for global sharing and collaborating now available in Moodle 2.0

.NET MAUI for C# Developers. Build cross-platform mobile and desktop applications

Jesse Liberty, Rodrigo Juarez, Maddy Montaquila (Leger)

While UI plays a pivotal role in retaining users in a highly competitive landscape, maintaining the same UI can be tricky if you use different languages for different platforms, leading to mismatches and un-synced pages. In this book, you'll see how .NET MAUI allows you to create a real-world application that will run natively on different platforms. By building on your C# experience, you’ll further learn to create beautiful and engaging UI using XAML, architect a solid app, and discover best practices for this Microsoft platform.The book starts with the fundamentals and quickly moves on to intermediate and advanced topics on laying out your pages, navigating between them, and adding controls to gather and display data. You’ll explore the key architectural pattern of Model-View-ViewModel: and ways to leverage it. You’ll also use xUnit and NSubstitute to create robust and reliable code.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to leverage .NET MAUI and create an API for your app to interact with a web frontend to the backend data using C#.

Transformers for Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. Explore Generative AI and Large Language Models with Hugging Face, ChatGPT, GPT-4V, and DALL-E 3 - Third Edition

Denis Rothman

Transformers for Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision, Third Edition, explores Large Language Model (LLM) architectures, applications, and various platforms (Hugging Face, OpenAI, and Google Vertex AI) used for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV).The book guides you through different transformer architectures to the latest Foundation Models and Generative AI. You’ll pretrain and fine-tune LLMs and work through different use cases, from summarization to implementing question-answering systems with embedding-based search techniques. You will also learn the risks of LLMs, from hallucinations and memorization to privacy, and how to mitigate such risks using moderation models with rule and knowledge bases. You’ll implement Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with LLMs to improve the accuracy of your models and gain greater control over LLM outputs.Dive into generative vision transformers and multimodal model architectures and build applications, such as image and video-to-text classifiers. Go further by combining different models and platforms and learning about AI agent replication.This book provides you with an understanding of transformer architectures, pretraining, fine-tuning, LLM use cases, and best practices.

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 R2 Cookbook. Over 100 recipes to build your own designs exploring the advanced functionality and features of System Center DPM 2012 R2

Robert Hedblom

LMMS: A Complete Guide to Dance Music Production

David Earl

You've scoured the forums, watched the tutorial videos, and done everything you can to learn the secrets of the art of making dance music. Everyone is saying something different about how to get into producing your own projects. This book will help connect the dots and lay a solid foundation of knowledge so you can get beats banging out of LMMS.This book will show you the ins and outs of making Dance music with LMMS. Do you make house, trance, techno or down-tempo? After this book you'll be able to make a song that stands out from the masses, using time honoured tricks of the trade. From inception to conception, this book will help give you a workflow to channel your muse using LMMS.Readers will be given a brief lesson on the best of dance music history, then learn how to recreate it using the Open Source digital workstation - LMMS. The reader will be guided through creating a project from start to finish. By the end of this book, the reader will know how to create a full dance track in LMMS and make it ready for distribution.Along the way, readers will take short stops into music theory, song arranging, recording, and other related information to give them a good foundation for making dance music with depth as well as power. Reading LMMS: A Complete Guide to Dance Music Production will not just teach the reader how to use LMMS, but also how good dance music is crafted. The reader will not just be taught how to make decisions in LMMS, but when and why. After devouring this book, the reader should be able to focus on his or her creativity, with LMMS as a co-conspirator in the process of making great dance music.

Building Analytics Teams. Harnessing analytics and artificial intelligence for business improvement

John K. Thompson, Douglas B. Laney

In Building Analytics Teams, John K. Thompson, with his 30+ years of experience and expertise, illustrates the fundamental concepts of building and managing a high-performance analytics team, including what to do, who to hire, projects to undertake, and what to avoid in the journey of building an analytically sound team. The core processes in creating an effective analytics team and the importance of the business decision-making life cycle are explored to help achieve initial and sustainable success.The audiobook demonstrates the various traits of a successful and high-performing analytics team and then delineates the path to achieve this with insights on the mindset, advanced analytics models, and predictions based on data analytics. It also emphasizes the significance of the macro and micro processes required to evolve in response to rapidly changing business needs.The audiobook dives into the methods and practices of managing, developing, and leading an analytics team. Once you've brought the team up to speed, the audiobook explains how to govern executive expectations and select winning projects.By the end of this audiobook, you will have acquired the knowledge to create an effective business analytics team and develop a production environment that delivers ongoing operational improvements for your organization.

Drupal 8 Theming with Twig. Master Drupal 8’s new Twig templating engine to create fun and fast websites with simple steps to help you move from concept to completion

Chaz Chumley

Drupal 8 is an open source content management system and powerful framework that helps deliver great websites to individuals and organizations, including non-profits, commercial, and government around the globe. This new release has been built on top of object-oriented PHP and includes more than a handful of improvements such as a better user experience, cleaner HTML5 markup, a new templating engine called Twig, multilingual capabilities, new configuration management, and effortless content authoring. Drupal 8 will quickly become the new standard for deploying content to both the web and mobile applications. However, with so many new changes, it can quickly become overwhelming knowing where to start and how to quickly.Starting from the bottom up, we will install, set up, and configure Drupal 8. We’ll navigate the Admin interface so you can learn how to work with core themes and create new custom block layouts. Walk through a real-world project to create a Twig theme from concept to completion while adopting best practices to implement CSS frameworks and JavaScript libraries. We will see just how quick and easy it is to create beautiful, responsive Drupal 8 websites while avoiding the common mistakes that many front-end developers make.

Mastering Xamarin.Forms. Build rich, maintainable, multi-platform, native mobile apps with Xamarin.Forms - Second Edition

Ed Snider

Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit to develop effective, robust mobile app architecture. Starting with an app built with the basics of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit, we'll go step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices.We'll start by introducing a core separation between the app's user interface and the app's business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data-binding. Then we will focus on building out a layer of plugin-like services that handle platform-specific utilities such as navigation and geo-location, as well as how to loosely use these services in the app with inversion of control and dependency injection. Next we'll connect the app to a live web-based API and set up offline synchronization. Then, we'll dive into testing the app logic through unit tests. Finally, we will setup Visual Studio App Center to automate building, testing, distributing and monitoring the app.