Publisher: K-i-s-publishing
Oleg Vasilev, Maxim Lapan, Martijn van Otterlo,...
Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On is a comprehensive guide to the very latest DL tools and their limitations. You will evaluate methods including Cross-entropy and policy gradients, before applying them to real-world environments. Take on both the Atari set of virtual games and family favorites such as Connect4.The book provides an introduction to the basics of RL, giving you the know-how to code intelligent learning agents to take on a formidable array of practical tasks. Discover how to implement Q-learning on 'grid world' environments, teach your agent to buy and trade stocks, and find out how natural language models are driving the boom in chatbots.
Sudharsan Ravichandiran
With significant enhancements in the quality and quantity of algorithms in recent years, this second edition of Hands-On Reinforcement Learning with Python has been revamped into an example-rich guide to learning state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) and deep RL algorithms with TensorFlow 2 and the OpenAI Gym toolkit.In addition to exploring RL basics and foundational concepts such as Bellman equation, Markov decision processes, and dynamic programming algorithms, this second edition dives deep into the full spectrum of value-based, policy-based, and actor-critic RL methods. It explores state-of-the-art algorithms such as DQN, TRPO, PPO and ACKTR, DDPG, TD3, and SAC in depth, demystifying the underlying math and demonstrating implementations through simple code examples.The book has several new chapters dedicated to new RL techniques, including distributional RL, imitation learning, inverse RL, and meta RL. You will learn to leverage stable baselines, an improvement of OpenAI’s baseline library, to effortlessly implement popular RL algorithms. The book concludes with an overview of promising approaches such as meta-learning and imagination augmented agents in research.By the end, you will become skilled in effectively employing RL and deep RL in your real-world projects.
Andy Peng, Alex Strick van Linschoten, Duarte...
Learn how to build, fine-tune, and deploy AI systems using DeepSeek, one of the most influential open-source large language models available today. This book guides you through real-world DeepSeek applications—from understanding its core architecture and training foundations to developing reasoning agents and deploying production-ready systems.Starting with a concise synthesis of DeepSeek's research, breakthroughs, and open-source philosophy, you’ll progress to hands-on projects including prompt engineering, workflow design, and rationale distillation. Through detailed case studies—ranging from document understanding to legal clause analysis—you’ll see how to use DeepSeek in high-value GenAI scenarios.You’ll also learn to build sophisticated agent workflows and prepare data for fine-tuning. By the end of the book, you’ll have the skills to integrate DeepSeek into local deployments, cloud CI/CD pipelines, and custom LLMOps environments.Written by experts with deep knowledge of open-source LLMs and deployment ecosystems, this book is your comprehensive guide to DeepSeek’s capabilities and implementation.
Colin Domoney, Chris Wysopal, Isabelle Mauny
Along with the exponential growth of API adoption comes a rise in security concerns about their implementation and inherent vulnerabilities. For those seeking comprehensive insights into building, deploying, and managing APIs as the first line of cyber defense, this book offers invaluable guidance. Written by a seasoned DevSecOps expert, Defending APIs addresses the imperative task of API security with innovative approaches and techniques designed to combat API-specific safety challenges.The initial chapters are dedicated to API building blocks, hacking APIs by exploiting vulnerabilities, and case studies of recent breaches, while the subsequent sections of the book focus on building the skills necessary for securing APIs in real-world scenarios.Guided by clear step-by-step instructions, you’ll explore offensive techniques for testing vulnerabilities, attacking, and exploiting APIs. Transitioning to defensive techniques, the book equips you with effective methods to guard against common attacks. There are plenty of case studies peppered throughout the book to help you apply the techniques you’re learning in practice, complemented by in-depth insights and a wealth of best practices for building better APIs from the ground up.By the end of this book, you’ll have the expertise to develop secure APIs and test them against various cyber threats targeting APIs.
Defensive Security with Kali Purple. Cybersecurity strategies using ELK Stack and Kali Linux
Karl Lane
Defensive Security with Kali Purple combines red team tools from the Kali Linux OS and blue team tools commonly found within a security operations center (SOC) for an all-in-one approach to cybersecurity. This book takes you from an overview of today's cybersecurity services and their evolution to building a solid understanding of how Kali Purple can enhance training and support proof-of-concept scenarios for your technicians and analysts.After getting to grips with the basics, you’ll learn how to develop a cyber defense system for Small Office Home Office (SOHO ) services. This is demonstrated through the installation and configuration of supporting tools such as virtual machines, the Java SDK, Elastic, and related software. You’ll then explore Kali Purple’s compatibility with the Malcolm suite of tools, including Arkime, CyberChef, Suricata, and Zeek. As you progress, the book introduces advanced features, such as security incident response with StrangeBee’s Cortex and TheHive and threat and intelligence feeds. Finally, you’ll delve into digital forensics and explore tools for social engineering and exploit development.By the end of this book, you’ll have a clear and practical understanding of how this powerful suite of tools can be implemented in real-world scenarios.
Victor Wu
Virtualized systems are well established now, and their disparate components can be found bundled together in hyper-converged infrastructures, such as VxRail from Dell EMC. Dell VxRail System Design and Best Practices will take you, as a system architect or administrator, through the process of designing and protecting VxRail systems.While this book assumes a certain level of knowledge of VMware, vSphere 7.x, and vCenter Server, you’ll get a thorough overview of VxRail's components, features, and architecture, as well as a breakdown of the benefits of this hyper-converged system. This guide will give you an in-depth understanding of VxRail, as well as plenty of practical examples and self-assessment questions along the way to help you plan and design every core component of a VxRail system – from vSAN storage policies to cluster expansion. It's no good having a great system if you lose everything when it breaks, so you'll spend some time examining advanced recovery options, such as VMware Site Recovery Manager and Veeam Backup and Replication.By the end of this book, you will have got to grips with Dell’s hyper-converged VxRail offering, taking your virtualization proficiency to the next level.
Daniele Teti
Delphi is a cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports rapid application development for Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Google Android, and Apple iOS. It helps you to concentrate on the real business and save yourself the pain of wandering amid GUI widget details, or having to tackle inter-platform incompatibilities. It also has a wide range of drag-and-drop controls, helping you code your business logic into your business model, and it compiles natively for desktop and mobile platforms.This book will teach you how to design and develop applications, deploy them on the cloud platform, and distribute them within an organization via Google Play and other similar platforms.You will begin with the basics of Delphi and get acquainted with JSON format strings, XSLT transformations, unicode encodings and various types of streams. We then move on to more advanced topics such as developing higher-order functions and using enumerators and RTTI. You will get an understanding of how Delphi RTL functions and how to use FireMonkey in a VCL application. We will then cover topics such as multithreading, using the parallel programming library and putting Delphi on a server. We will also take a look at the new feature of WebBroker Apache modules and then ride the mobile revolution with FireMonkey. By the end of the book, you will be able to develop and deploy cross-platform applications using Delphi .
Daniele Spinetti, Daniele Teti
Delphi is a cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE) that supports rapid application development on different platforms, saving you the pain of wandering amid GUI widget details or having to tackle inter-platform incompatibilities. Delphi Cookbook begins with the basics of Delphi and gets you acquainted with JSON format strings, XSLT transformations, Unicode encodings, and various types of streams. You’ll then move on to more advanced topics such as developing higher-order functions and using enumerators and run-time type information (RTTI). As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll understand Delphi RTL functions, use FireMonkey in a VCL application, and cover topics such as multithreading, using aparallel programming library and deploying Delphi on a server. You’ll take a look at the new feature of WebBroker Apache modules, join the mobile revolution with FireMonkey, and learn to build data-driven mobile user interfaces using the FireDAC database access framework. This book will also show you how to integrate your apps with Internet of Things (IoT).By the end of the book, you will have become proficient in Delphi by exploring its different aspects such as building cross-platforms and mobile applications, designing server-side programs, and integrating these programs with IoT.
Andrea Magni
FireMonkey (FMX) is a cross-platform application framework that allows developers to create exciting user interfaces and deliver applications on multiple operating systems (OS). This book will help you learn visual programming with Delphi and FMX.Starting with an overview of the FMX framework, including a general discussion of the underlying philosophy and approach, you’ll then move on to the fundamentals and architectural details of FMX. You’ll also cover a significant comparison between Delphi and the Visual Component Library (VCL). Next, you’ll focus on the main FMX components, data access/data binding, and style concepts, in addition to understanding how to deliver visually responsive UIs. To address modern application development, the book takes you through topics such as animations and effects, and provides you with a general introduction to parallel programming, specifically targeting UI-related aspects, including application responsiveness. Later, you’ll explore the most important cross-platform services in the FMX framework, which are essential for delivering your application on multiple platforms while retaining the single codebase approach. Finally, you’ll learn about FMX’s built-in 3D functionalities.By the end of this book, you’ll be familiar with the FMX framework and be able to build effective cross-platform apps.
Primož Gabrijelčič
Delphi is a cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports rapid application development for Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Google Android, iOS, and now Linux with RAD Studio 10.2. This book will be your guide to build efficient high performance applications with Delphi.The book begins by explaining how to find performance bottlenecks and apply the correct algorithm to fix them. It will teach you how to improve your algorithms before taking you through parallel programming. You’ll then explore various tools to build highly concurrent applications. After that, you’ll delve into improving the performance of your code and master cross-platform RTL improvements. Finally, we’ll go through memory management with Delphi and you’ll see how to leverage several external libraries to write better performing programs. By the end of the book, you’ll have the knowledge to create high performance applications with Delphi.
Primož Gabrijelčič
Performance matters! Users hate to use programs that are not responsive to interactions or run too slow to be useful. While becoming a programmer is simple enough, you require dedication and hard work to achieve an advanced level of programming proficiency where you know how to write fast code.This book begins by helping you explore algorithms and algorithmic complexity and continues by describing tools that can help you find slow parts of your code. Subsequent chapters will provide you with practical ideas about optimizing code by doing less work or doing it in a smarter way. The book also teaches you how to use optimized data structures from the Spring4D library, along with exploring data structures that are not part of the standard Delphi runtime library.The second part of the book talks about parallel programming. You’ll learn about the problems that only occur in multithreaded code and explore various approaches to fixing them effectively. The concluding chapters provide instructions on writing parallel code in different ways – by using basic threading support or focusing on advanced concepts such as tasks and parallel patterns.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned to look at your programs from a totally different perspective and will be equipped to effortlessly make your code faster than it is now.
William Duarte
Delphi is a cross-platform programming language and software development kit that supports rapid application development for Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Android, and iOS.With the help of seven practical projects, this book will guide you through the best practices, Delphi Run-Time Library (RTL) resources, and design patterns. Whether you use the Visual Component Library (VCL) or FireMonkey (FMX) framework, these design patterns will be implemented in the same way in Delphi, using Object Pascal. In the first few chapters, you will explore advanced features that will help you build rich applications using the same code base for both mobile and desktop projects. In addition to this, you’ll learn how to implement microservice architecture in Delphi. As you get familiar with the various aspects of Delphi, you will no longer need to maintain source code for similar projects, program business rules on screens, or fill your forms with data access components.By the end of this book, you will have gained an understanding of the principles of clean code and become proficient in building robust and scalable applications in Delphi.
Koichi Tsuji, Suvrutt Gurjar, Takuya Miyai
Many citizen developers regularly use spreadsheets in their business and day-to-day jobs. With AppSheet, you can take your spreadsheets to the next level by enhancing their ease of use. The platform allows you to run your business efficiently and manage it in the field outside of an office or indoor environment. This book enables you to create your own simple or medium to complex hybrid apps for business or personal use.As a beginner to AppSheet, this book will show you how the AppSheet Editor works and how it is used to configure, test, and deploy an app and share it with others as users or co-authors. You’ll learn about widely used features such as how to use data sources, create app views and actions, construct expressions with AppSheet functions, and make your app secure through security and UX options. Next, you’ll create email/attachment templates and develop reports/documents based on templates, store in the cloud, and send files through emails. You’ll also understand how to integrate third-party services and monitor various usage statistics of your app. As you progress, you’ll explore various features with the help of sample apps that you create using the book.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to make the most of AppSheet to build powerful and efficient applications.
Reinier van Altena
This practical guide on no-code development with Betty Blocks will take you through the different features, no-code functionalities, and capabilities of the Betty Blocks platform using real-world use cases. The book will equip you with the tools to develop business apps based on various data models, business processes, and more.You’ll begin with an introduction to the basic concepts of the Betty Blocks no-code platform, such as developing IT solutions on various use cases including reporting apps, data tracking apps, workflows, and business processes. After getting to grips with the basics, you’ll explore advanced concepts such as building powerful applications that impact the business straight away with no-code application development and quickly creating prototypes. The concluding chapters will help you get a solid understanding of rapid application development, building customer portals, building dynamic web apps, drag-and-drop front ends, visual modelling capabilities, and complex data models.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a comprehensive understanding of building your own applications as a citizen developer using the Betty Blocks no-code platform.
Fanny Ip, Jeremiah Crowley
Artificial intelligence (AI) enables enterprises to optimize business processes that are probabilistic, highly variable, and require cognitive abilities with unstructured data. Many believe there is a steep learning curve with AI, however, the goal of our book is to lower the barrier to using AI. This practical guide to AI with UiPath will help RPA developers and tech-savvy business users learn how to incorporate cognitive abilities into business process optimization. With the hands-on approach of this book, you'll quickly be on your way to implementing cognitive automation to solve everyday business problems.Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book will help you understand the power of AI and give you an overview of the relevant out-of-the-box models. You’ll learn about cognitive AI in the context of RPA, the basics of machine learning, and how to apply cognitive automation within the development lifecycle. You’ll then put your skills to test by building three use cases with UiPath Document Understanding, UiPath AI Center, and Druid.By the end of this AI book, you'll be able to build UiPath automations with the cognitive capabilities of intelligent document processing, machine learning, and chatbots, while understanding the development lifecycle.
Caio Calderari
In an era marked by a growing demand for tech solutions and a shortage of skilled developers, companies grapple with hiring expenses. No-code tools offer a faster, more affordable software development alternative. Leading this no-code revolution is Bubble, enabling newcomers to construct impressive web applications in a matter of weeks if not days.Written by Caio Calderari, a seasoned no-code expert with 17 years of experience to offers practical advice for mastering no-code application development. You'll learn to plan your app with Bubble's visual builder features and UI components and implement frontend functionalities such as customizing layouts and creating responsive user interfaces. The book covers workflow automation, database management, security best practices, and backend functionality setup and advances to span the Bubble plugin ecosystem and API integration for third-party services to improve the app's functionality. Additionally, you'll explore app testing, debugging, performance monitoring, and maintenance. From launching with a custom domain to gathering user feedback for continuous improvement and optimization of performance and scalability, you’ll learn every aspect of Bubble's app development and deployment.By the end of this book, you'll know how to bring your digital ideas to life without writing code.
Peter Krause
Whether you want to organize simple files or perform more complex consolidations between different Office programs and remote-control applications that don't allow outside access, Power Automate Desktop helps meet these challenges. This book shows you how to leverage this workflow automation platform by explaining the underlying RPA concepts in a step-by-step way.You’ll start with simple flows that can be easily recorded and further processed using the built-in recorder. Later, you’ll learn how to use the more advanced actions to automate folder and file management and enable Office programs to interact with each other. You’ll also get to grips with integrating desktop flows into other cloud environments and further enhance their value using AI. As you progress, you’ll understand how flows can run unattended and how they are managed in the Power Platform, as well as key concepts such as creating, modifying, debugging, and error-handling UI flows. Finally, the book will guide you to use Process Automation Designer (PAD) in conjunction with your frequently used desktop systems to automate routine tasks.By the end of this book, you’ll have become a Power Automate Desktop expert, automating both professional and personal tasks.
Sean Sullivan
While you can use any automation software to simplify task automation, scaling automation to suit your growing business needs becomes difficult using only a command-line tool. Ansible Automation Platform standardizes how automation is deployed, initiated, delegated, and audited, and this comprehensive guide shows you how you can simplify and scale its management.The book starts by taking you through the ways to get Ansible Automation Platform installed, their pros and cons, and the initial configuration. You’ll learn about each object in the platform, how it interacts with other objects, as well as best practices for defining and managing objects to save time. You’ll see how to maintain the created pieces with infrastructure as code. As you advance, you’ll monitor workflows with CI/CD playbooks and understand how Ansible Automation Platform integrates with many other services such as GitLab and GitHub.By the end of this book, you’ll have worked through real-world examples to make the most of the platform while learning how to manipulate, manage, and deploy any playbook to Ansible Automation Platform.
Alexei Khlebnikov, Jarle Adolfsen
Security and networking are essential features of software today. The modern internet is full of worms, Trojan horses, men-in-the-middle, and other threats. This is why maintaining security is more important than ever.OpenSSL is one of the most widely used and essential open source projects on the internet for this purpose. If you are a software developer, system administrator, network security engineer, or DevOps specialist, you’ve probably stumbled upon this toolset in the past – but how do you make the most out of it? With the help of this book, you will learn the most important features of OpenSSL, and gain insight into its full potential.This book contains step-by-step explanations of essential cryptography and network security concepts, as well as practical examples illustrating the usage of those concepts. You’ll start by learning the basics, such as how to perform symmetric encryption and calculate message digests. Next, you will discover more about cryptography: MAC and HMAC, public and private keys, and digital signatures. As you progress, you will explore best practices for using X.509 certificates, public key infrastructure, and TLS connections.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to use the most popular features of OpenSSL, allowing you to implement cryptography and TLS in your applications and network infrastructure.
Govindakumar Madhavan
Beginning with basic concepts like central tendency, dispersion, and types of distribution, this course will help you build a robust understanding of data analysis. It progresses to more advanced topics, including hypothesis testing, outliers, and the intricacies of dependent versus independent variables, ensuring you grasp the statistical tools necessary for data-driven decision-making.Moving ahead, you'll explore the mathematical frameworks crucial for machine learning algorithms. Learn about the significance of percentiles, the distinction between population and sample, and the vital role of precision versus accuracy in data science. Chapters on linear algebra and regression will enhance your ability to implement and interpret complex models, while practical lessons on measuring algorithm accuracy and understanding key machine learning concepts will round out your expertise.The course culminates with an in-depth look at specific machine learning techniques such as decision trees, k-nearest neighbors (kNN), and gradient descent. Each chapter builds on the last, guiding you through a logical progression of knowledge and skills. By the end, you will have not only mastered the theoretical aspects but also gained practical insights into applying these techniques in real-world scenarios.
Alexandre Portela dos Santos
Deno is a JavaScript and TypeScript runtime with secure defaults and a great developer experience. With Deno Web Development, you'll learn all about Deno's primitives, its principles, and how you can use them to build real-world applications. The book is divided into three main sections: an introduction to Deno, building an API from scratch, and testing and deploying a Deno application.The book starts by getting you up to speed with Deno's runtime and the reason why it was developed. You'll explore some of the concepts introduced by Node, why many of them transitioned into Deno, and why new features were introduced. After understanding Deno and why it was created, you will start to experiment with Deno, exploring the toolchain and writing simple scripts and CLI applications. As you progress to the second section, you will create a simple web application and then add more features to it. This application will evolve from a simple 'hello world' API to a web application connected to the database, with users, authentication, and a JavaScript client. In the third section, the book will take you through topics such as dependency management, configuration and testing, finishing with an application deployed in a cloud environment.By the end of this web development book, you will become comfortable with using Deno to create, maintain, and deploy secure and reliable web applications.
Aaron Guilmette
The Microsoft MS-300 exam is designed to test the knowledge and skills of administrators in deploying, configuring, and managing SharePoint Online, SharePoint Server, SharePoint Hybrid, OneDrive for Business, and Teams. This book offers up-to-date coverage of the important topics based on the MS-300 exam and features question answers and insider tips to help you prepare for certification.Written in a clear, succinct way, the book starts by helping you configure and manage SharePoint Online. You’ll then delve into OneDrive for Business, right from managing users and groups, through to monitoring sharing and security. Further chapters will guide you through working with Teams, with an emphasis on managing identity authentication, resolving issues with the service, and even observing usage patterns. Later, you’ll get up to speed with workload integrations, covering the Yammer business communications platform, before moving on to understand how to integrate Microsoft Stream with SharePoint, Teams, and Yammer. Finally, you’ll learn to develop data governance and user adoption strategies.By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed with SharePoint Online and have learned the essential techniques and concepts you need to know in order to pass the MS-300 certification exam.
Jacek Doktór, Paweł Jarosz
It becomes important to plan, design, and deploy configurations when administrators know that Configuration Manager interacts with a number of infrastructure components such as Active Directory Domain Services, network protocols, Windows Server services, and so on.Via real-world-world deployment scenarios, this book will help you implement a single primary site or multiples sites. You will be able to efficiently plan and deploy a multiple-site hierarchy such as central administration site. Next, you will learn various methods to plan and deploy Configuration Manager clients, secure them and make the most of new features offered through ConfigMgr 1706 like compliance, deploying updates operating systems to the endpoints. Then, this book will show you how to install, configure, and run SQL reports to extract information. Lastly, you will also learn how to create and manage users access in an ConfigMgr environmentBy the end of this book, you will have learned to use the built-in mechanism to back up and restore data and also design maintenance plan.