Create interactive cross-platform games with the Godot Engine 3.0 About This Book ? Learn the art of developing cross-platform games ? Leverage Godot’s node and scene system to design robust, reusable game objects ? Integrate Blender easily and efficiently with Godot to create powerful 3D games Who This Book Is For Godot Engine Game Development Projects is for both new users and experienced developers, who want to learn to make games using a modern game engine. Some prior programming experience is recommended. What You Will Learn ? Get started with the Godot game engine and editor ? Organize a game project ? Import graphical and audio assets ? Use Godot’s node and scene system to design robust, reusable game objects ? Write code in GDScript to capture input and build complex behaviors ? Implement user interfaces to display information ? Create visual effects to spice up your game ? Learn techniques that you can apply to your own game projects In Detail Godot Engine Game Development Projects is an introduction to the Godot game engine and its new 3.0 version. Godot 3.0 brings a large number of new features and capabilities that make it a strong alternative to expensive commercial game engines. For beginners, Godot offers a friendly way to learn game development techniques, while for experienced developers it is a powerful, customizable tool that can bring your visions to life. This book consists of five projects that will help developers achieve a sound understanding of the engine when it comes to building games. Game development is complex and involves a wide spectrum of knowledge and skills. This book can help you build on your foundation level skills by showing you how to create a number of small-scale game projects. Along the way, you will learn how Godot works and discover important game development techniques that you can apply to your projects. Using a straightforward, step-by-step approach and practical examples, the book will take you from the absolute basics through to sophisticated game physics, animations, and other techniques. Upon completing the final project, you will have a strong foundation for future success with Godot 3.0. Style and approach The book is divided into five parts; each covering a different small-game project using a straightforward, step-by-step approach and practical examples. The book will take readers from the absolute basics through sophisticated game physics, animation, and other techniques.

Develop robust, Scala-powered projects with the help of machine learning libraries such as SparkML to harvest meaningful insight Key Features *Gain hands-on experience in building data science projects with Scala *Exploit powerful functionalities of machine learning libraries *Use machine learning algorithms and decision tree models for enterprise apps Book Description Scala, together with the Spark Framework, forms a rich and powerful data processing ecosystem. Modern Scala Projects is a journey into the depths of this ecosystem. The machine learning (ML) projects presented in this book enable you to create practical, robust data analytics solutions, with an emphasis on automating data workflows with the Spark ML pipeline API. This book showcases or carefully cherry-picks from Scala’s functional libraries and other constructs to help readers roll out their own scalable data processing frameworks. The projects in this book enable data practitioners across all industries gain insights into data that will help organizations have strategic and competitive advantage. Modern Scala Projects focuses on the application of supervisory learning ML techniques that classify data and make predictions. You'll begin with working on a project to predict a class of flower by implementing a simple machine learning model. Next, you'll create a cancer diagnosis classification pipeline, followed by projects delving into stock price prediction, spam filtering, fraud detection, and a recommendation engine. By the end of this book, you will be able to build efficient data science projects that fulfil your software requirements. What you will learn *Create pipelines to extract data or analytics and visualizations *Automate your process pipeline with jobs that are reproducible *Extract intelligent data efficiently from large, disparate datasets *Automate the extraction, transformation, and loading of data *Develop tools that collate, model, and analyze data *Maintain the integrity of data as data flows become more complex *Develop tools that predict outcomes based on “pattern discovery” *Build really fast and accurate machine-learning models in Scala Who this book is for Modern Scala Projects is for Scala developers who would like to gain some hands-on experience with some interesting real-world projects. Prior programming experience with Scala is necessary.

Learn all the fundamentals of PHP with a book that blends theory with practice to build up the skills you need for modern web development. Key Features *Brush up on basic PHP 7 syntax and work with variables, data types, arrays, and loops *Master advanced concepts like building your own frameworks and creating your own applications *Apply your newly learned PHP skills to a variety of real-life business scenarios Book Description PHP is the preferred server-side scripting language for tech giants such as Facebook, Wikipedia, and Tumblr despite full-stack JavaScript gaining popularity with upcoming developers. This is because PHP performs better when dealing with heavy computations on the back end. In this book, you’ll learn everything you need to get up and running with the latest version of PHP, including package management with tools such as composer, secure database operations, and a whole host of other best practices that will help you stay a step ahead of traditional programmers. What you will learn *Understand the fundamentals of PHP and work with classes and inheritance *Learn about database operations and package management with composer *Tackle common security concerns and pitfalls using authentication and validation *Build effective PHP applications and frameworks for your business needs Who this book is for If you’re already familiar with another programming language and want to learn about the fundamentals of PHP programming, you’ll find the flow of this book to be an ideal fit. Having a prior understanding of HTML, MySQL, CSS, and JavaScript will be beneficial, but is not mandatory.

A fast-paced guide to putting your GeoServer-based application into fast, user-friendly, and secure production Key Features * Resolve bottlenecks, optimize data stores, and cluster server resources * Use identity management and authentication for a user-specific, secure web application * Go beyond traditional web hosting to explore the full range of hosting options in the cloud Book Description GeoServer is open source, server-side software written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data. In this book, you'll start by learning how to develop a spatial analysis platform with web processing services. Then you'll see how to develop an algorithm by chaining together geospatial analysis processes, which you can share with anyone in the world. Next you'll delve into a very important technique to improve the speed of your map application—tile caching. Here, you'll understand how tile caching works, how to develop an effective tile cache-supported web service, and how to leverage tile caching in your OpenLayers web application. Further on, you'll explore important tweaks to produce a performant GeoServer-backed web mapping application. Moving on, you'll enable authentication on the frontend and backend to protect sensitive map data, and deliver sensitive data to your end user. Finally, you'll see how to put your web application into production in a secure and user-friendly way. You'll go beyond traditional web hosting to explore the full range of hosting options in the cloud, and maintain a reliable server instance. What you will learn * Develop a WPS-processing service to allow web-based geospatial data processing * Get to know important techniques to improve the speed of your web map application—tile caching, raster data optimization, and server clustering * Find out which GeoServer settings resolve bottlenecks * Develop an algorithm by chaining geospatial analysis processes together * Put your application into production with hosting, monitoring, and automated backup and recovery * Understand how to develop an effective tile cache-supported web service * Master techniques that ensure resilient server deployment Who this book is for This book is for anyone who wants to learn about advanced interfaces, security, and troubleshooting techniques in GeoServer. A basic understanding of GeoServer is required

Secure your Java applications by integrating the Spring Security framework in your code Key Features *Provide authentication, authorization and other security features for Java applications. *Learn how to secure microservices, cloud, and serverless applications easily *Understand the code behind the implementation of various security features Book Description Security is one of the most vital concerns for any organization. The complexity of an application is compounded when you need to integrate security with existing code, new technology, and other frameworks. This book will show you how to effectively write Java code that is robust and easy to maintain. Hands-On Spring Security 5 for Reactive Applications starts with the essential concepts of reactive programming, Spring Framework, and Spring Security. You will then learn about a variety of authentication mechanisms and how to integrate them easily with the Spring MVC application. You will also understand how to achieve authorization in a Spring WebFlux application using Spring Security.You will be able to explore the security confgurations required to achieve OAuth2 for securing REST APIs and integrate security in microservices and serverless applications. This book will guide you in integrating add-ons that will add value to any Spring Security module. By the end of the book, you will be proficient at integrating Spring Security in your Java applications What you will learn *Understand how Spring Framework and Reactive application programming are connected *Implement easy security confgurations with Spring Security expressions *Discover the relationship between OAuth2 and OpenID Connect *Secure microservices and serverless applications with Spring *Integrate add-ons, such as HDIV, Crypto Module, and CORS support *Apply Spring Security 5 features to enhance your Java reactive applications Who this book is for If you are a Java developer who wants to improve application security, then this book is for you. A basic understanding of Spring, Spring Security framework, and reactive applications is required to make the most of the book.

Learn every step you need for product design and development Key Features *Explore all the tools that you need to be a complete UX designer *Code the product designs you’ve created to become a full-stack designer *Build an amazing portfolio with real-world projects Book Description Designing user experience (UX) is one of the most important aspects of a project, as it has a direct effect on how customers think of your company. The process of designing a user experience is one of the most challenging yet rewarding aspects of product development. Hands-On UX Design for Developers will teach you how to create amazing user experiences for products from scratch. This book starts with helping you understand the importance of a good UX design and the role of a UX designer. It will take you through the different stages of designing a UX and the application of various principles of psychology in UX design. Next, you will learn how to conduct user research and market research, which is crucial to creating a great UX. You will also learn how to create user personas and use it for testing. This book will help you gain the ability to think like a UX designer and understand both sides of product development: design and coding. You will explore the latest tools, such as Sketch, Balsamiq, and Framer.js, to create wireframes and prototypes. The concluding chapters will take you through designing your UI, dealing with big data while designing a UX, and the fundamentals of frontend. Finally, you'll prepare your portfolio and become job ready in the UX arena. What you will learn *What UX is and what a UX designer does *Explore the UX Process and science of making products user-friendly *Create user interfaces and learn which tools to use *Understand how your design works in the real world *Create UI interaction, animation, wireframes, and prototypes *Design a product with users in mind *Develop a personal portfolio and be well-prepared to join the UX world Who this book is for Hands-On UX/UI Design for Developers is for web designers who have knowledge of basic UX design principles.

Add a touch of data analytics to your healthcare systems and get insightful outcomes Key Features *Perform healthcare analytics with Python and SQL *Build predictive models on real healthcare data with pandas and scikit-learn *Use analytics to improve healthcare performance Book Description In recent years, machine learning technologies and analytics have been widely utilized across the healthcare sector. Healthcare Analytics Made Simple bridges the gap between practising doctors and data scientists. It equips the data scientists’ work with healthcare data and allows them to gain better insight from this data in order to improve healthcare outcomes. This book is a complete overview of machine learning for healthcare analytics, briefly describing the current healthcare landscape, machine learning algorithms, and Python and SQL programming languages. The step-by-step instructions teach you how to obtain real healthcare data and perform descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics using popular Python packages such as pandas and scikit-learn. The latest research results in disease detection and healthcare image analysis are reviewed. By the end of this book, you will understand how to use Python for healthcare data analysis, how to import, collect, clean, and refine data from electronic health record (EHR) surveys, and how to make predictive models with this data through real-world algorithms and code examples. What you will learn *Gain valuable insight into healthcare incentives, finances, and legislation *Discover the connection between machine learning and healthcare processes *Use SQL and Python to analyze data *Measure healthcare quality and provider performance *Identify features and attributes to build successful healthcare models *Build predictive models using real-world healthcare data *Become an expert in predictive modeling with structured clinical data *See what lies ahead for healthcare analytics Who this book is for Healthcare Analytics Made Simple is for you if you are a developer who has a working knowledge of Python or a related programming language, although you are new to healthcare or predictive modeling with healthcare data. Clinicians interested in analytics and healthcare computing will also benefit from this book. This book can also serve as a textbook for students enrolled in an introductory course on machine learning for healthcare.

Get up and running with AWS automation using CloudFormation Key Features *Explore the fundamentals of AWS CloudFormation *Get acquainted with concepts such as CloudFormation templates and mappings *Learn to implement Infrastructure as a Code (IaC) on AWS Book Description As the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure is gradually moving towards cloud, managing cloud-related tasks efficiently continues to be a challenge for system administrators. CloudFormation is a language developed for managing infrastructure-related services efficiently on AWS and its features help secure the AWS resource deployment process. Learn CloudFormation serves as a fundamental guide to kick-start your journey on CloudFormation. We will introduce you to the basic concepts on IaC and the AWS services required for implementing automation and infrastructure management. Then, we deep dive into concepts such as CloudFormation mapping, conditions, limit, and output and EC2. In the concluding chapters, you will manage the entire AWS infrastructure using CloudFormation templates. By the end of this book, you will get up and running with IaC with CloudFormation. What you will learn *Understand AWS CloudFormation *Develop AWS CloudFormation templates *Deploy AWS CloudFormation for AWS resources *Build your first AWS CloudFormation project *Explore AWS Security features *Deploy testing and production stages using CloudFormation Who this book is for Learn CloudFormation is for cloud engineers, system administrators, cloud architects, or any stakeholders working in the field of cloud development or cloud administration. Basic knowledge of AWS is necessary.

Install, Configure and Setup different connections with pfSense Key Features *Build firewall and routing solutions with PfSense. *Learn how to create captive portals, how to connect Pfsense to your https environment and so on. *Practical approach towards building firewall solutions for your organization Book Description As computer networks become ubiquitous, it has become increasingly important to both secure and optimize our networks. pfSense, an open-source router/firewall, provides an easy, cost-effective way of achieving this – and this book explains how to install and configure pfSense in such a way that even a networking beginner can successfully deploy and use pfSense. This book begins by covering networking fundamentals, deployment scenarios, and hardware sizing guidelines, as well as how to install pfSense. The book then covers configuration of basic services such as DHCP, DNS, and captive portal and VLAN configuration. Careful consideration is given to the core firewall functionality of pfSense, and how to set up firewall rules and traffic shaping. Finally, the book covers the basics of VPNs, multi-WAN setups, routing and bridging, and how to perform diagnostics and troubleshooting on a network. What you will learn *Install pfSense *Configure additional interfaces, and enable and configure DHCP *Understand Captive portal *Understand firewalls and NAT, and traffic shaping *Learn in detail about VPNs *Understand Multi-WAN *Learn about routing and bridging in detail *Understand the basics of diagnostics and troubleshooting networks Who this book is for This book is towards any network security professionals who want to get introduced to the world of firewalls and network configurations using Pfsense. No knowledge of PfSense is required

Get to grips with Kibana and its advanced functions to create interactive visualizations and dashboards Key Features *Explore visualizations and perform histograms, stats, and map analytics *Unleash X-Pack and Timelion, and learn alerting, monitoring, and reporting features *Manage dashboards with Beats and create machine learning jobs for faster analytics Book Description Kibana is one of the popular tools among data enthusiasts for slicing and dicing large datasets and uncovering Business Intelligence (BI) with the help of its rich and powerful visualizations. To begin with, Mastering Kibana 6.x quickly introduces you to the features of Kibana 6.x, before teaching you how to create smart dashboards in no time. You will explore metric analytics and graph exploration, followed by understanding how to quickly customize Kibana dashboards. In addition to this, you will learn advanced analytics such as maps, hits, and list analytics. All this will help you enhance your skills in running and comparing multiple queries and filters, influencing your data visualization skills at scale. With Kibana’s Timelion feature, you can analyze time series data with histograms and stats analytics. By the end of this book, you will have created a speedy machine learning job using X-Pack capabilities. What you will learn *Create unique dashboards with various intuitive data visualizations *Visualize Timelion expressions with added histograms and stats analytics *Integrate X-Pack with your Elastic Stack in simple steps *Extract data from Elasticsearch for advanced analysis and anomaly detection using dashboards *Build dashboards from web applications for application logs *Create monitoring and alerting dashboards using Beats Who this book is for Mastering Kibana 6.x is for you if you are a big data engineer, DevOps engineer, or data scientist aspiring to go beyond data visualization at scale and gain maximum insights from their large datasets. Basic knowledge of Elasticstack will be an added advantage, although not mandatory.

Discover how you can migrate a traditional on-premise SQL server database to a cloud-based solution with Microsoft Azure. Built with database administrators in mind, this book emulates different scenarios you might come across while working with large, complex SQL database migrations and provides solutions for effectively managing the migrated databases. Key Features *Implement backup, restore, and recovery of Azure SQL databases *Create shards and elastic pools to scale Azure SQL databases *Automate common management tasks with PowerShell *Implement over 40 practical activities and exercises across 24 topics to reinforce your learning Book Description As the cloud version of SQL Server, Azure SQL Database differs in key ways when it comes to management, maintenance, and administration. It’s important to know how to administer SQL Database to fully benefit from all of the features and functionality that it provides. This book addresses important aspects of an Azure SQL Database instance such as migration, backup restorations, pricing policies, security, scalability, monitoring, performance optimization, high availability, and disaster recovery. It is a complete guide for database administrators, and ideal for those who are planning to migrate from on premise SQL Server database to an Azure SQL Server database. What you will learn *Learn how to provision a new database or migrate an existing on-premise solution *Understand how to backup, restore, secure, and scale your own Azure SQL Database *Optimize the performance by monitoring and tuning your cloud-based SQL instance *Implement high availability and disaster recovery procedures with SQL Database *Develop a roadmap for your own scalable cloud solution with Azure SQL Database Who this book is for This book is ideal for database administrators, database developers, or application developers who are interested in developing or migrating existing applications with Azure SQL Database. Prior experience of working with an on-premise SQL Server deployment and brief knowledge of PowerShell and C# are recommended prerequisites.

Bridge the gap between developer and data scientist by creating a modern open-source, Python-based toolset that works with Jupyter Notebook, and PixieDust. Key Features *Think deeply as a developer about your strategy and toolset in data science *Discover the best tools that will suit you as a developer in your data analysis *Accelerate the road to data insight as a programmer using Jupyter Notebook *Deep dive into multiple industry data science use cases Book Description Thoughtful Data Science brings new strategies and a carefully crafted programmer's toolset to work with modern, cutting-edge data analysis. This new approach is designed specifically to give developers more efficiency and power to create cutting-edge data analysis and artificial intelligence insights. Industry expert David Taieb bridges the gap between developers and data scientists by creating a modern open-source, Python-based toolset that works with Jupyter Notebook, and PixieDust. You'll find the right balance of strategic thinking and practical projects throughout this book, with extensive code files and Jupyter projects that you can integrate with your own data analysis. David Taieb introduces four projects designed to connect developers to important industry use cases in data science. The first is an image recognition application with TensorFlow, to meet the growing importance of AI in data analysis. The second analyses social media trends to explore big data issues and natural language processing. The third is a financial portfolio analysis application using time series analysis, pivotal in many data science applications today. The fourth involves applying graph algorithms to solve data problems. Taieb wraps up with a deep look into the future of data science for developers and his views on AI for data science. What you will learn *Bridge the gap between developer and data scientist with a Python-based toolset *Get the most out of Jupyter Notebooks with new productivity-enhancing tools *Explore and visualize data using Jupyter Notebooks and PixieDust *Work with and assess the impact of artificial intelligence in data science *Work with TensorFlow, graphs, natural language processing, and time series *Deep dive into multiple industry data science use cases *Look into the future of data analysis and where to develop your skills Who this book is for This book is for established developers who want to bridge the gap between programmers and data scientists. With the introduction of PixieDust from its creator, the book will also be a great desk companion for the already accomplished Data Scientist. Some fluency in data interpretation and visualization is also assumed since this book addresses data professionals such as business and general data analysts. It will be helpful to have some knowledge of Python, using Python libraries, and some proficiency in web development.

Getting started with data science doesn't have to be an uphill battle. This step-by-step guide is ideal for beginners who know a little Python and are looking for a quick, fast-paced introduction. About This Book ? Get up and running with the Jupyter ecosystem and some example datasets ? Learn about key machine learning concepts like SVM, KNN classifiers and Random Forests ? Discover how you can use web scraping to gather and parse your own bespoke datasets Who This Book Is For This book is ideal for professionals with a variety of job descriptions across large range of industries, given the rising popularity and accessibility of data science. You'll need some prior experience with Python, with any prior work with libraries like Pandas, Matplotlib and Pandas providing you a useful head start. What You Will Learn ? Identify potential areas of investigation and perform exploratory data analysis ? Plan a machine learning classification strategy and train classification models ? Use validation curves and dimensionality reduction to tune and enhance your models ? Scrape tabular data from web pages and transform it into Pandas DataFrames ? Create interactive, web-friendly visualizations to clearly communicate your findings In Detail Get to grips with the skills you need for entry-level data science in this hands-on Python and Jupyter course. You'll learn about some of the most commonly used libraries that are part of the Anaconda distribution, and then explore machine learning models with real datasets to give you the skills and exposure you need for the real world. We'll finish up by showing you how easy it can be to scrape and gather your own data from the open web, so that you can apply your new skills in an actionable context. Style and approach This book covers every aspect of the standard data-workflow process within a day, along with theory, practical hands-on coding, and relatable illustrations.

A hands-on guide to creating, monitoring, and tuning a high performance Spring web application About This Book ? Understand common performance pitfalls and improve your application's performance ? Build and deploy strategies for complex applications using the microservice architecture ? Understand internals of JVM - the core of all Java Runtime Environments Who This Book Is For If you’re a Spring developer who’d like to build high performance applications and have more control over your application's performance in production and development, this book is for you. Some familiarity with Java, Maven, and Eclipse is necessary. What You Will Learn ? Master programming best practices and performance improvement with bean wiring ? Analyze the performance of various AOP implementations ? Explore database interactions with Spring to optimize design and configuration ? Solve Hibernate performance issues and traps ? Leverage multithreading and concurrent programming to improve application performance ? Gain a solid foundation in JVM performance tuning using various tools ? Learn the key concepts of the microservice architecture and how to monitor them ? Perform Spring Boot performance tuning, monitoring, and health checks In Detail While writing an application, performance is paramount. Performance tuning for real-world applications often involves activities geared toward detecting bottlenecks. The recent release of Spring 5.0 brings major advancements in the rich API provided by the Spring framework, which means developers need to master its tools and techniques to achieve high performance applications. Hands-On High Performance with Spring 5 begins with the Spring framework's core features, exploring the integration of different Spring projects. It proceeds to evaluate various Spring specifications to identify those adversely affecting performance. You will learn about bean wiring configurations, aspect-oriented programming, database interaction, and Hibernate to focus on the metrics that help identify performance bottlenecks. You will also look at application monitoring, performance optimization, JVM internals, and garbage collection optimization. Lastly, the book will show you how to leverage the microservice architecture to build a high performance and resilient application. By the end of the book, you will have gained an insight into various techniques and solutions to build and troubleshoot high performance Spring-based applications. Style and approach This book takes a step-by-step approach with focused examples to teach you how to increase application performance.

Find out how to write Kotlin code without overhead and how to use different profiling tools and bytecode viewer to inspect expressions of Kotlin language. About This Book ? Apply modern Kotlin features to speed up processing and implement highly efficient and reliable codes. ? Learn memory optimization, concurrency, multi-threading, scaling, and caching techniques to achieve high performance. ? Learn how to prevent unnecessary overhead and use profiling tools to detect performance issues. Who This Book Is For This book is for Kotlin developers who would like to build reliable and high-performance applications. Prior Kotlin programming knowledge is assumed. What You Will Learn ? Understand the importance of high performance ? Learn performance metrics ? Learn popular design patterns currently being used in Kotlin ? Understand how to apply modern Kotlin features to data processing ? Learn how to use profling tools ? Discover how to read bytecode ? Learn to perform memory optimizations ? Uncover approaches to the multithreading environment In Detail The ease with which we write applications has been increasing, but with it comes the need to address their performance. A balancing act between easily implementing complex applications and keeping their performance optimal is a present-day requirement In this book, we explore how to achieve this crucial balance, while developing and deploying applications with Kotlin. The book starts by analyzing various Kotlin specifcations to identify those that have a potentially adverse effect on performance. Then, we move on to monitor techniques that enable us to identify performance bottlenecks and optimize performance metrics. Next, we look at techniques that help to us achieve high performance: memory optimization, concurrency, multi threading, scaling, and caching. We also look at fault tolerance solutions and the importance of logging. We'll also cover best practices of Kotlin programming that will help you to improve the quality of your code base. By the end of the book, you will have gained some insight into various techniques and solutions that will help to create high-performance applications in the Kotlin environment Style and approach This book guides you through how to use profiling tools to detect performance issues and build high-performance applications in the Kotlin environment.

This practical guide will teach you how deep learning (DL) can be used to solve complex real-world problems. About This Book ? Explore deep reinforcement learning (RL), from the first principles to the latest algorithms ? Evaluate high-profile RL methods, including value iteration, deep Q-networks, policy gradients, TRPO, PPO, DDPG, D4PG, evolution strategies and genetic algorithms ? Keep up with the very latest industry developments, including AI-driven chatbots Who This Book Is For Some fluency in Python is assumed. Basic deep learning (DL) approaches should be familiar to readers and some practical experience in DL will be helpful. This book is an introduction to deep reinforcement learning (RL) and requires no background in RL. What You Will Learn ? Understand the DL context of RL and implement complex DL models ? Learn the foundation of RL: Markov decision processes ? Evaluate RL methods including Cross-entropy, DQN, Actor-Critic, TRPO, PPO, DDPG, D4PG and others ? Discover how to deal with discrete and continuous action spaces in various environments ? Defeat Atari arcade games using the value iteration method ? Create your own OpenAI Gym environment to train a stock trading agent ? Teach your agent to play Connect4 using AlphaGo Zero ? Explore the very latest deep RL research on topics including AI-driven chatbots In Detail Recent developments in reinforcement learning (RL), combined with deep learning (DL), have seen unprecedented progress made towards training agents to solve complex problems in a human-like way. Google's use of algorithms to play and defeat the well-known Atari arcade games has propelled the field to prominence, and researchers are generating new ideas at a rapid pace. 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. Style and approach Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On explains the art of building self-learning agents using algorithms and practical examples. Experiment with famous examples, such as Google's defeat of well-known Atari arcade games.

Develop efficient and modern full-stack applications using Spring Boot and React 16 About This Book ? Develop resourceful backends using Spring Boot and faultless frontends using React. ? Explore the techniques involved in creating a full-stack app by going through a methodical approach. ? Learn to add CRUD functionalities and use Material UI in the user interface to make it more user-friendly. Who This Book Is For Java developers who are familiar with Spring, but have not yet built full-stack applications What You Will Learn ? Create a RESTful web service with Spring Boot ? Understand how to use React for frontend programming ? Gain knowledge of how to create unit tests using JUnit ? Discover the techniques that go into securing the backend using Spring Security ? Learn how to use Material UI in the user interface to make it more user-friendly ? Create a React app by using the Create React App starter kit made by Facebook In Detail Apart from knowing how to write frontend and backend code, a full-stack engineer has to tackle all the problems that are encountered in the application development life cycle, starting from a simple idea to UI design, the technical design, and all the way to implementing, testing, production, deployment, and monitoring. This book covers the full set of technologies that you need to know to become a full-stack web developer with Spring Boot for the backend and React for the frontend. This comprehensive guide demonstrates how to build a modern full-stack application in practice. This book will teach you how to build RESTful API endpoints and work with the data access Layer of Spring, using Hibernate as the ORM. As we move ahead, you will be introduced to the other components of Spring, such as Spring Security, which will teach you how to secure the backend. Then, we will move on to the frontend, where you will be introduced to React, a modern JavaScript library for building fast and reliable user interfaces, and its app development environment and components. You will also create a Docker container for your application. Finally, the book will lay out the best practices that underpin professional full-stack web development. Style and approach A step-by-step guide to building full-stack applications along with best practices to make your Full-stack development journey easier

Get acquainted with GCP and manage robust, highly available, and dynamic solutions to drive business objective About This Book ? Identify the strengths, weaknesses and ideal use-cases for individual services offered on the Google Cloud Platform ? Make intelligent choices about which cloud technology works best for your use-case ? Leverage Google Cloud Platform to analyze and optimize technical and business processes Who This Book Is For If you are a Cloud architect who is responsible to design and manage robust cloud solutions with Google Cloud Platform, then this book is for you. System engineers and Enterprise architects will also find this book useful. A basic understanding of distributed applications would be helpful, although not strictly necessary. Some working experience on other public cloud platforms would help too. What You Will Learn ? Set up GCP account and utilize GCP services using the cloud shell, web console, and client APIs ? Harness the power of App Engine, Compute Engine, Containers on the Kubernetes Engine, and Cloud Functions ? Pick the right managed service for your data needs, choosing intelligently between Datastore, BigTable, and BigQuery ? Migrate existing Hadoop, Spark, and Pig workloads with minimal disruption to your existing data infrastructure, by using Dataproc intelligently ? Derive insights about the health, performance, and availability of cloud-powered applications with the help of monitoring, logging, and diagnostic tools in Stackdriver In Detail Using a public cloud platform was considered risky a decade ago, and unconventional even just a few years ago. Today, however, use of the public cloud is completely mainstream - the norm, rather than the exception. Several leading technology firms, including Google, have built sophisticated cloud platforms, and are locked in a fierce competition for market share. The main goal of this book is to enable you to get the best out of the GCP, and to use it with confidence and competence. You will learn why cloud architectures take the forms that they do, and this will help you become a skilled high-level cloud architect. You will also learn how individual cloud services are configured and used, so that you are never intimidated at having to build it yourself. You will also learn the right way and the right situation in which to use the important GCP services. By the end of this book, you will be able to make the most out of Google Cloud Platform design. Style and approach A clear, concise, and straightforward book which will enable to develop and manage optimum solutions for your infrastructure

Master Game UI system by creating captivating user interface components with Unity 5 through Unity 2018 and C#. Learn about UI texts, images, world space UI, mobile-specific UI and much more. About This Book ? Develop a game UI with both technical and aesthetic considerations ? Use all the UI elements provided by Unity's UI system ? Step-by-step examples of creating user interface components in the top game genres Who This Book Is For This book is for anyone keen to improve their games via a great user interface with Unity's UI system. If you're looking for a book that explains how to develop specific user interfaces or that thoroughly explains how each of the individual Unity components work, this book is for you. What You Will Learn ? Design principles and patterns for laying out elements in your UI ? Techniques that allow your UI to scale appropriately in different resolutions ? How to use automatic layouts to streamline your UI building process ? Properties of the Event System and how to appropriately hook events to your UI elements ? Access the components and properties of UI elements via code ? Implement all of Unity's built-in UI elements as well as those provided by TextMeshPro ? Develop key UI components that are popularly used in multiple game genres ? Add visual flare to user interfaces with the use of animation and particle effects ? Create a UI that displays in the Screen Space as well as World Space In Detail A functional UI is an important component for player interaction in every type of video game. Along with imparting crucial statistical information to the player, the UI is also the window through which the player engages with the world established by the game. Unity's tools give you the opportunity to create complex and attractive UIs to make your game stand out. This book helps you realize the full potential of Unity's powerful tools to create the best UI for your games by walking you through the creation of myriad user interface components. Learn how to create visually engaging heads-up-displays, pause menus, health bars, circular progress bars, animated menus, and more. This book not only teaches how to lay out visual elements, but also how to program these features and implement them across multiple games of varying genres. While working through the examples provided, you will learn how to develop a UI that scales to multiple screen resolutions, so your game can be released on multiple platforms with minimal changes. Style and approach The book walks you through the process of creating many different user interface components, by describing each UI component and property thoroughly and then providing step-by-step examples of its implementation. You will not only learn how to lay out visual elements, but you will also learn how to program for these features and hook them in to your game. The examples provided in the book can be reused for many other products.

Unleash Google's Cloud Platform to build, train and optimize machine learning models About This Book ? Get well versed in GCP pre-existing services to build your own smart models ? A comprehensive guide covering aspects from data processing, analyzing to building and training ML models ? A practical approach to produce your trained ML models and port them to your mobile for easy access Who This Book Is For This book is for data scientists, machine learning developers and AI developers who want to learn Google Cloud Platform services to build machine learning applications. Since the interaction with the Google ML platform is mostly done via the command line, the reader is supposed to have some familiarity with the bash shell and Python scripting. Some understanding of machine learning and data science concepts will be handy What You Will Learn ? Use Google Cloud Platform to build data-based applications for dashboards, web, and mobile ? Create, train and optimize deep learning models for various data science problems on big data ? Learn how to leverage BigQuery to explore big datasets ? Use Google’s pre-trained TensorFlow models for NLP, image, video and much more ? Create models and architectures for Time series, Reinforcement Learning, and generative models ? Create, evaluate, and optimize TensorFlow and Keras models for a wide range of applications In Detail Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine combines the services of Google Cloud Platform with the power and flexibility of TensorFlow. With this book, you will not only learn to build and train different complexities of machine learning models at scale but also host them in the cloud to make predictions. This book is focused on making the most of the Google Machine Learning Platform for large datasets and complex problems. You will learn from scratch how to create powerful machine learning based applications for a wide variety of problems by leveraging different data services from the Google Cloud Platform. Applications include NLP, Speech to text, Reinforcement learning, Time series, recommender systems, image classification, video content inference and many other. We will implement a wide variety of deep learning use cases and also make extensive use of data related services comprising the Google Cloud Platform ecosystem such as Firebase, Storage APIs, Datalab and so forth. This will enable you to integrate Machine Learning and data processing features into your web and mobile applications. By the end of this book, you will know the main difficulties that you may encounter and get appropriate strategies to overcome these difficulties and build efficient systems. Style and approach An easy-to-follow step by step guide which will help you get to the grips with real-world applications of Google Cloud Machine Learning.

Get familiar with the building blocks of IoT solutions using off–the-shelf IoT platforms. About This Book ? Work with various trending IoT platforms such as AWS IoT, Azure IoT, Google IoT, IBM Watson IoT, and Kaa IoT ? Gain hands-on knowledge working with Cloud-based IoT platforms, IoT Analytics, and so on. ? A practical guide that will help you build IoT strategies for your organization Who This Book Is For This book is targeted at IoT architects and engineers, or any stakeholders working with IoT solutions in an organization. This book will also help decision makers and professionals from small- and medium-sized enterprises build an IoT strategy for their venture. What You Will Learn ? Connect a Temperature and Humidity sensor and see how these two can be managed from various platforms ? Explore the core components of AWS IoT such as AWS Kinesis and AWS IoTRules Engine ? Build a simple analysis dashboard using Azure IoT and Power BI ? Understand the fundamentals of Google IoT and use Google core APIs to build your own dashboard ? Get started and work with the IBM Watson IoT platform ? Integrate Cassandra and Zeppelin with Kaa IoT dashboard ? Review some Machine Learning and AI and get to know more about their implementation in the IoT domain. In Detail There is a lot of work that is being done in the IoT domain and according to Forbes the global IoT market will grow from $157B in 2016 to $457B by 2020. This is an amazing market both in terms technology advancement as well as money. In this book, we will be covering five popular IoT platforms, namely, AWS IoT, Microsoft Azure IoT, Google IoT Core, IBM Watson IoT, and Kaa IoT middleware. You are going to build solutions that will use a Raspberry Pi 3, a DHT11 Temperature and humidity sensor, and a dashboard to visualize the sensor data in real-time. Furthermore, you will also explore various components of each of the platforms that are needed to achieve the desired solution. Besides building solutions, you will look at how Machine Learning and IoT go hand in hand and later design a simple predictive web service based on this concept. By the end of this book, you will be in a position to implement an IoT strategy best-fit for your organization Style and approach An informative guide that will help you design and implement an IoT Strategy best-fit for your organization