Alexa Skills Projects. Build exciting projects with Amazon Alexa and integrate it with Internet of Things

Madhur Bhargava

Amazon Echo is a smart speaker developed by Amazon, which connects to Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service and is entirely controlled by voice commands. Amazon Echo is currently being used for a variety of purposes such as home automation, asking generic queries, and even ordering a cab or pizza.Alexa Skills Projects starts with a basic introduction to Amazon Alexa and Echo. You will then deep dive into Alexa Programmingconcepts such as Intents, Slots, Lambdas and maintaining your skill’s state using DynamoDB. You will get a clear understanding of how some of the most popular Alexa Skills work, and gain experience of working with real-world Amazon Echo applications. In the concluding chapters, you will explore the future of voice-enabled applications and their coverage with respect to the Internet of Things.By the end of the book, you will have learned to design Alexa Skills for specific purposes and interact with Amazon Echo to execute these skills.

Java 9 Dependency Injection. Write loosely coupled code with Spring 5 and Guice

Nilang Patel, Krunal Patel

Dependency Injection (DI) is a design pattern that allows us to remove the hard-coded dependencies and make our application loosely coupled, extendable, and maintainable. We can implement DI to move the dependency resolution from compile-time to runtime. This book will be your one stop guide to write loosely coupled code using the latest features of Java 9 with frameworks such as Spring 5 and Google Guice. We begin by explaining what DI is and teaching you about IoC containers. Then you’ll learn about object compositions and their role in DI. You’ll find out how to build a modular application and learn how to use DI to focus your efforts on the business logic unique to your application and let the framework handle the infrastructure work to put it all together. Moving on, you’ll gain knowledge of Java 9’s new features and modular framework and how DI works in Java 9. Next, we’ll explore Spring and Guice, the popular frameworks for DI. You’ll see how to define injection keys and configure them at the framework-specific level. After that, you’ll find out about the different types of scopes available in both popular frameworks. You’ll see how to manage dependency of cross-cutting concerns while writing applications through aspect-oriented programming.Towards the end, you’ll learn to integrate any third-party library in your DI-enabled application and explore common pitfalls and recommendations to build a solid application with the help of best practices, patterns, and anti-patterns in DI.

Daniel Arbuckle's Mastering Python. Build powerful Python applications

Daniel Arbuckle

Daniel Arbuckle's Mastering Python covers the basics of operating in a Python development environment, before moving on to more advanced topics. Daniel presents you with real-world solutions to Python 3.6 and advanced-level concepts, such as reactive programming, microservices, ctypes, and Cython tools.You don't need to be familiar with the Python language to use this book, as Daniel starts with a Python primer. Throughout, Daniel highlights the major aspects of managing your Python development environment, shows you how to handle parallel computation, and helps you to master asynchronous I/O with Python 3.6 to improve performance. Finally, Daniel will teach you the secrets of metaprogramming and unit testing in Python, helping you acquire the perfect skillset to be a Python expert. Daniel will get you up to speed on everything from basic programming practices to high-end tools and techniques, things that will help set you apart as a successful Python programmer.

Hands-On Microservices with C#. Designing a real-world, enterprise-grade microservice ecosystem with the efficiency of C# 7

Matt R. Cole

C# is a powerful language when it comes to building applications and software architecture using rich libraries and tools such as .NET.This book will harness the strength of C# in developing microservices architectures and applications.This book shows developers how to develop an enterprise-grade, event-driven, asynchronous, message-based microservice framework using C#, .NET, and various open source tools. We will discuss how to send and receive messages, how to design many types of microservice that are truly usable in a corporate environment. We will also dissect each case and explain the code, best practices, pros and cons, and more.Through our journey, we will use many open source tools, and create file monitors, a machine learning microservice, a quantitative financial microservice that can handle bonds and credit default swaps, a deployment microservice to show you how to better manage your deployments, and memory, health status, and other microservices. By the end of this book, you will have a complete microservice ecosystem you can place into production or customize in no time.

Advanced Serverless Architectures with Microsoft Azure. Design complex serverless systems quickly with the scalability and benefits of Azure

Daniel Bass

Advanced Serverless Architectures with Microsoft Azure redefines your experience of designing serverless systems. It shows you how to tackle challenges of varying levels, not just the straightforward ones. You'll be learning how to deliver features quickly by building systems, which retain the scalability and benefits of serverless.You'll begin your journey by learning how to build a simple, completely serverless application. Then, you'll build a highly scalable solution using a queue, load messages onto the queue, and read them asynchronously. To boost your knowledge further, the book also features durable functions and ways to use them to solve errors in a complex system. You'll then learn about security by building a security solution from serverless components. Next, you’ll gain an understanding of observability and ways to leverage application insights to bring you performance benefits. As you approach the concluding chapters, you’ll explore chaos engineering and the benefits of resilience, by actively switching off a few of the functions within a complex system, submitting a request, and observing the resulting behavior. By the end of this book, you will have developed the skills you need to build and maintain increasingly complex systems that match evolving platform requirements.

Mastering OpenCV 3. Get hands-on with practical Computer Vision using OpenCV 3 - Second Edition

Shervin Emami, David Millán Escrivá, Daniel Lelis Baggio, Roy Shilkrot, ...

As we become more capable of handling data in every kind, we are becoming more reliant on visual input and what we can do with those self-driving cars, face recognition, and even augmented reality applications and games. This is all powered by Computer Vision.This book will put you straight to work in creating powerful and unique computer vision applications. Each chapter is structured around a central project and deep dives into an important aspect of OpenCV such as facial recognition, image target tracking, making augmented reality applications, the 3D visualization framework, and machine learning. You’ll learn how to make AI that can remember and use neural networks to help your applications learn.By the end of the book, you will have created various working prototypes with the projects in the book and will be well versed with the new features of OpenCV3.

Selenium WebDriver Quick Start Guide. Write clear, readable, and reliable tests with Selenium WebDriver 3

Pinakin Chaubal

Selenium WebDriver is a platform-independent API for automating the testing of both browser and mobile applications. It is also a core technology in many other browser automation tools, APIs, and frameworks. This book will guide you through the WebDriver APIs that are used in automation tests.Chapter by chapter, we will construct the building blocks of a page object model framework as you learn about the required Java and Selenium methods and terminology.The book starts with an introduction to the same-origin policy, cross-site scripting dangers, and the Document Object Model (DOM). Moving ahead, we'll learn about XPath, which allows us to select items on a page, and how to design a customized XPath. After that, we will be creating singleton patterns and drivers. Then you will learn about synchronization and handling pop-up windows. You will see how to create a factory for browsers and understand command design patterns applicable to this area.At the end of the book, we tie all this together by creating a framework and implementing multi-browser testing with Selenium Grid.

Learning Android Game Development. A Beginner's guide to developing popular Android games

Nikhil Malankar

In this book, we’ll start with installing Android studio and its components, and setting it up ready for Android N. We teach you how to take inputs from users, create images and interact with them, and work with sprites to create animations. You’ll then explore the various collision detection methods and use sprites to create an explosion. Moving on, you’ll go through the process of UI creation and see how to create buttons as well as display the score and other parameters on screen. By the end of the book, you will have a working example and an understanding of a 2D platform game like Super Mario and know how to convert your 2D games to 3D games.