An advanced C# beginners guide to some of the tougher parts of the C# language! About This Book ? Learn C#, Visual Studio, and object-oriented programming ? Get practical examples of advanced C# language features so that you can easily master them yourself ? Use the C# programming language to work generics and lambda expressions ? Program C# and SQL Server 2014 ? Get ready for your first MVC applications Who This Book Is For This book is for anyone who is interested in learning how to program the more advanced aspects of the C# language. Previous programming knowledge of C# is required, at least to the level of basic object-oriented programming. Readers can benefit from first reading Tom Owsiak’s companion book, Beginning C# 7 Hands-On – The Core Language, as a preparation for the more advanced elements and techniques presented in this book. What You Will Learn ? Learn C# advanced language elements and techniques ? Discover advanced C# techniques with hands-on working examples ? Build on your knowledge of OOP by using C# generics and lambda expressions ? Work with C# and LINQ custom data types ? Program C# and SQL Server 2017 to manage and query data ? Create your first full MVC application In Detail Beginning C# 7 Hands-On – Advanced Language Features assumes that you’ve mastered the basic elements of the C# language and that you're now ready to learn the more advanced C# language and syntax, line by line, in a working Visual Studio environment. You'll learn how to code advanced C# language topics including generics, lambda expressions, and anonymous methods. You'll learn to use query syntax to construct queries and deploy queries that perform aggregation functions. Work with C# and SQL Server 2014 to perform complex joins and stored procedures. Explore advanced file access methods, and see how to serialize and deserialize objects – all by writing working lines of code that you can run within Visual Studio. This book is designed for beginner C# developers who have mastered the basics now, and anyone who needs a fast reference to using advanced C# language features in practical coding examples. You'll also take a look at C# through web programming with web forms. By the time you’ve finished this book, you’ll know all the critical advanced elements of the C# language and how to program everything from C# generics to XML, LINQ, and your first full MVC web applications. These are the advanced building blocks that you can then combine to exploit the full power of the C# programming language, line by line. Style and approach A comprehensive book that blends theory with just the right amount of practical code implementations, to help you get up and running with the C# programming language and its advanced features. You’ll also get to work with other tools and technologies that complement C# programming. Each core part of the C# language is coded as you learn, and code output is tested every time to verify the syntax is working as expected, so it’s easy for you to learn directly from the working code examples. Advanced-level features of C# will be used to code and work through examples.

Build over 8 chatbots and conversational user interfaces with leading tools such as Chatfuel, Dialogflow, Microsoft Bot Framework, Twilio, Alexa Skills, and Google Actions and deploying them on channels like Facebook Messenge, Amazon Alexa and Google Home About This Book ? Understand the different use cases of Conversational UIs with this project-based guide ? Build feature-rich Chatbots and deploy them on multiple platforms ? Get real-world examples of voice-enabled UIs for personal and home assistance Who This Book Is For This book is for developers who are interested in creating interactive conversational UIs/Chatbots. A basic understanding of JavaScript and web APIs is required. What You Will Learn ? Design the flow of conversation between the user and the chatbot ? Create Task model chatbots for implementing tasks such as ordering food ? Get new toolkits and services in the chatbot ecosystem ? Integrate third-party information APIs to build interesting chatbots ? Find out how to deploy chatbots on messaging platforms ? Build a chatbot using MS Bot Framework ? See how to tweet, listen to tweets, and respond using a chatbot on Twitter ? Publish chatbots on Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa In Detail Conversation as an interface is the best way for machines to interact with us using the universally accepted human tool that is language. Chatbots and voice user interfaces are two flavors of conversational UIs. Chatbots are real-time, data-driven answer engines that talk in natural language and are context-aware. Voice user interfaces are driven by voice and can understand and respond to users using speech. This book covers both types of conversational UIs by leveraging APIs from multiple platforms. We'll take a project-based approach to understand how these UIs are built and the best use cases for deploying them. We'll start by building a simple messaging bot from the Facebook Messenger API to understand the basics of bot building. Then we move on to creating a Task model that can perform complex tasks such as ordering and planning events with the newly-acquired-by-Google Dialogflow and Microsoft Bot framework. We then turn to voice-enabled UIs that are capable of interacting with users using speech with Amazon Alexa and Google Home. By the end of the book, you will have created your own line of chatbots and voice UIs for multiple leading platforms. Style and approach This is a practical book, where each chapter focuses on a chatbot project. The chapters take a step-by-step approach to help you build intelligent chatbots that act as personal assistants.

Discover how to build your own Intelligent Internet of Things projects and bring a new degree of interconnectivity to your world. About This Book ? Build intelligent and unusual IoT projects in just 7 days, ? Create home automation, smart home, and robotic projects and allow your devices to do smart work ? Build IoT skills through enticing projects and leverage revolutionary computing hardware through the RPi and Arduino. Who This Book Is For If you're a developer, IoT enthusiast, or just someone curious about Internet of Things, then this book is for you. A basic understanding of electronic hardware, networking, and basic programming skills would do wonders. What You Will Learn ? Learn how to get started with intelligent IoT projects ? Explore various pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms to make IoT projects smarter. ? Make decisions on which devices to use based on the kind of project to build. ? Create a simple machine learning application and implement decision system concepts ? Build a smart parking system using Arduino and Raspberry Pi ? Learn how to work with Amazon Echo and to build your own smart speaker machine ? Build multi-robot cooperation using swarm intelligence. In Detail Intelligent IoT Projects in 7 days is about creating smart IoT projects in just 7 days. This book will help you to overcome the challenge of analyzing data from physical devices. This book aims to help you put together some of the most exciting IoT projects in a short span of time. You'll be able to use these in achieving or automating everyday tasks—one project per day. We will start with a simple smart gardening system and move on to a smart parking system, and then we will make our own vending machine, a smart digital advertising dashboard, a smart speaker machine, an autonomous fire fighter robot, and finally look at a multi-robot cooperation using swarm intelligence Style and approach A clear step-by-step instruction guide to completing fully-fledged projects in just 7 days

Unlock modern machine learning and deep learning techniques with Python by using the latest cutting-edge open source Python libraries. About This Book ? Second edition of the bestselling book on Machine Learning ? A practical approach to key frameworks in data science, machine learning, and deep learning ? Use the most powerful Python libraries to implement machine learning and deep learning ? Get to know the best practices to improve and optimize your machine learning systems and algorithms Who This Book Is For If you know some Python and you want to use machine learning and deep learning, pick up this book. Whether you want to start from scratch or extend your machine learning knowledge, this is an essential and unmissable resource. Written for developers and data scientists who want to create practical machine learning and deep learning code, this book is ideal for developers and data scientists who want to teach computers how to learn from data. What You Will Learn ? Understand the key frameworks in data science, machine learning, and deep learning ? Harness the power of the latest Python open source libraries in machine learning ? Explore machine learning techniques using challenging real-world data ? Master deep neural network implementation using the TensorFlow library ? Learn the mechanics of classification algorithms to implement the best tool for the job ? Predict continuous target outcomes using regression analysis ? Uncover hidden patterns and structures in data with clustering ? Delve deeper into textual and social media data using sentiment analysis In Detail Machine learning is eating the software world, and now deep learning is extending machine learning. Understand and work at the cutting edge of machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning with this second edition of Sebastian Raschka’s bestselling book, Python Machine Learning. Thoroughly updated using the latest Python open source libraries, this book offers the practical knowledge and techniques you need to create and contribute to machine learning, deep learning, and modern data analysis. Fully extended and modernized, Python Machine Learning Second Edition now includes the popular TensorFlow deep learning library. The scikit-learn code has also been fully updated to include recent improvements and additions to this versatile machine learning library. Sebastian Raschka and Vahid Mirjalili’s unique insight and expertise introduce you to machine learning and deep learning algorithms from scratch, and show you how to apply them to practical industry challenges using realistic and interesting examples. By the end of the book, you’ll be ready to meet the new data analysis opportunities in today’s world. If you’ve read the first edition of this book, you’ll be delighted to find a new balance of classical ideas and modern insights into machine learning. Every chapter has been critically updated, and there are new chapters on key technologies. You’ll be able to learn and work with TensorFlow more deeply than ever before, and get essential coverage of the Keras neural network library, along with the most recent updates to scikit-learn. Style and Approach Python Machine Learning Second Edition takes a practical, hands-on coding approach so you can learn about machine learning by coding with Python. This book moves fluently between the theoretical principles of machine learning and the practical details of implementation with Python.

Orchestrate the designing, development, testing, and deployment of web applications with Symfony About This Book Create a robust and reliable Symfony development pipeline using Amazon's cloud platform Cut development and maintenance costs by defining crystal clear features and possible scenarios for each feature before implementation Follow detailed examples provided in each chapter to create a task management application Who This Book Is For If you are a PHP developer with some experience in Symfony and are looking to master the framework and use it to its full potential, then this book is for you. Though experience with PHP, object-oriented techniques, and Symfony basics is assumed, this book will give you a crash course on the basics and then proceed to more advanced topics. What You Will Learn Install and configure Symfony and required third-party bundles to develop a task management application Set up a continuous integration server to orchestrate automatic builds every time you add a new feature to your project Reduce maintenance costs dramatically using Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) Create a slick user interface using the Bootstrap framework Design robust business logic using Doctrine Build a comprehensive dashboard and secure your project using the Sonata project Improve performance using Redis, Memcache, and Varnish Create customized Symfony commands and add them to your console In Detail In this book, you will learn some lesser known aspects of development with Symfony, and you will see how to use Symfony as a framework to create reliable and effective applications. You might have developed some impressive PHP libraries in other projects, but what is the point when your library is tied to one particular projectWith Symfony, you can turn your code into a service and reuse it in other projects. This book starts with Symfony concepts such as bundles, routing, twig, doctrine, and more, taking you through the request/response life cycle. You will then proceed to set up development, test, and deployment environments in AWS. Then you will create reliable projects using Behat and Mink, and design business logic, cover authentication, and authorization steps in a security checking process. You will be walked through concepts such as DependencyInjection, service containers, and services, and go through steps to create customized commands for Symfony's console. Finally, the book covers performance optimization and the use of Varnish and Memcached in our project, and you are treated with the creation of database agnostic bundles and best practices. Style and approach A step-by-step guide to mastering Symfony while developing a task management application. Each chapter comes with detailed examples.

A foundational yet practical approach to UX that delivers more creative, collaborative, holistic, and mature design solutions, regardless of your background or experience About This Book Improve your UX design awareness and skills Gain greater confidence to know when you have delivered a “good” UX design Learn by example using a book designed by a UX mind for a UX mind Who This Book Is For This book is written for the beginner as well as the experienced UX practitioner, regardless of team size, company size, or job title. It is also intended for anyone with an interest in UX, engages with UX, is involved in any way in interactive problem solving and design, or simply wants to learn more about what we do, how we do it, and why those in the UX field are so passionate about wanting to do it better. What You Will Learn Awaken your UX mind and dispel the myths of non-UX thinkers Create the six optimal conditions for your best ideas to appear Identify and incorporate the ten design principles found in all good UX design Develop a broader understanding of Information Architecture (IA) to better engage, guide, and inform Develop a fundamental understanding of patterns and the properties that create them Raise your level of UX maturity with a strategy that transforms your approach to problem solving and helps others understand the true value of your work Utilize important tools of the UX trade that never go out of style Increase your knowledge of UX, incorporate valuable ideas and insights into your work, and look at design from a very unique perspective In Detail Written in an easy-to-read style, this book provides real-world examples, a historical perspective, and a holistic approach to design that will ground you in the fundamental essentials of interactive design, allow you to make more informed design decisions, and increase your understanding of UX in order to reach the highest levels of UX maturity. As you will see, UX is more than just delighting customers and users. It is also about thinking like a UX practitioner, making time for creativity, recognizing good design when you see it, understanding Information Architecture as more than just organizing and labeling websites, using design patterns to influence user behavior and decision making, approaching UX from a business perspective, transforming your client’s and company’s fundamental understanding of UX and its true value, and so much more. This book is an invaluable resource of knowledge, perspective, and inspiration for those seeking to become better UX designers, increase their confidence, become more mature design leaders, and deliver solutions that provide measurable value to stakeholders, customers, and users regardless of project type, size, and delivery method. Style and approach An in-depth, easy to read, and entertaining journey into and through the world of UX using real-world examples, thoughtful illustrations, and engaging quotes to inspire and explain fully the how and why of UX in a practical and impactful way and used immediately in your own work.

“Microsoft SharePoint for Business Executives: Q&A Handbook” is a quick, non-technical reference for business executives who need to get up to speed with SharePoint and understand how to make the right decision about implementations. With an easy to absorb Q&A approach and short bite size chapters focused on defined SharePoint subjects, the book follows specific SharePoint situations drawn from real world experience, enabling you to learn from anecdotes and case studies along the way. “Microsoft SharePoint for Business Executives: Q&A Handbook” is the perfect companion for business executives or non-technical team leaders who don’t want to trawl through a detailed, hands-on functionality guide to get up to speed with SharePoint. If you simply need to understand important implementation decisions or have the confidence to challenge your technical team on an approach, this book will prepare you to ask the right questions and make the right decisions. No prior knowledge of SharePoint is required.

This book will lead you, step by step and with illustrative screenshots, through a real example. Are you writing two websites – one for mobile and one for larger displaysOr perhaps you’ve heard of Responsive Design but are unsure how to bring HTML5, CSS3, or responsive design all together. If so, this book provides everything you need to take your web pages to the next level – before all your competitors do!

A practical, hands-on tutorial that shows small businesses to enterprises how to implement and migrate to Exchange Online in Office 365. If you are an information technology (IT) professional; administrator, small business owner, manager or consultant who needs to implement and migrate to Exchange Online in Office 365 within your business, then this book is for you. Knowledge of Microsoft Office 365 is not required, however, experience with Microsoft Exchange Server and mail clients, role and delegation concept is required.

Part of Packt’s Beginner’s Guide series, each chapter focuses on a specific part of your website and how to improve its design with the use of jQuery. There are plenty of screenshots and practical step-by-step instructions making it easy to apply jQuery to your site. This book is for designers who have the basics of HTML and CSS, but want to extend their knowledge by learning to use JavaScript and jQuery.

This book is an easy-to-follow, step-by-step beginner's guide covering the full process of creating a game. It is packed with examples and illustrations, with comprehensive coverage of each topic. If you want to learn how to make games using the Cocos2D framework, this book is for you. If you would like to build a good foundation for a career in game development as an independent game developer or at a game studio, or if you just want to make games as a hobby, then you'll love this book. You should have some basic programming experience with Objective-C and Xcode. To run the code in this book, you will also need an Intel-based Macintosh running OS X Mountain Lion (or later).

If you are a JavaScript developer who has been using DOM manipulation libraries such as Mootools or Scriptaculous, and you want go further in modern JavaScript development with a simple and well-documented library, then this book is for you. Learning how to use Knockout will be perfect as your next step towards building JavaScript applications that respond to user interaction.

This book is intended for those who want to learn to develop apps in Swift the right way. Whether you are an expert Objective-C programmer or new to this platform, you'll learn quickly, grasping the code of real-world apps to use Swift effectively. Prior experience in development for Apple devices would be helpful, but is not mandatory.

This book is intended for cloud engineers or administrators who wish to explore and gain hands-on experience of VMware vCloud Air. To make the most of this book, it would be beneficial to have a bit of familiarity with basic VMware vCloud concepts, but no prior experience is required.

Step through each of the core concepts of the jQuery library, building an overall picture of its capabilities. Once you have thoroughly covered the basics, the book returns to each concept to cover more advanced examples and techniques. This book is for web designers who want to create interactive elements for their designs, and for developers who want to create the best user interface for their web applications. Basic JavaScript programming and knowledge of HTML and CSS is required. No knowledge of jQuery is assumed, nor is experience with any other JavaScript libraries.

This beginner's guide focuses on getting you quickly through all the major learning points in a smooth, logical order. You'll also learn how to avoid some common pitfalls. Aspiring game developers who want to learn how to create their own levels, maps, game worlds and environments. You don’t need game design or game development experience and no experience of UDK is required

This is a step-by-step comprehensive tutorial with plenty of screenshots for easier and quicker learning and real-world examples for good pickup. This book is aimed at content creators and distributors who want to up their game to a full e-mail distribution engine. Further, it will certainly appeal to you if you are technically inclined and would rather roll your own system than use an off-the-shelf product. You are assumed to be familiar with the basic concepts of e-mail, editing text files, and managing remote files with FTP / SFTP. Advanced topics will teach you to get your hands dirty in some of PHPList's open-source code.

This book is a practical, step-by-step guide to creating and managing virtual machines using VMware Workstation.VMware Workstation: No Experience Necessary is for developers as well as system administrators who want to efficiently set up a test environment .You should have basic networking knowledge, and prior experience with Virtual Machines and VMware Player would be beneficial

Performance Testing With JMeter 2.9 is a standard tutorial that will help you polish your fundamentals, guide you through various advanced topics, and along the process help you learn new tools and skills.This book is for developers, quality assurance engineers, testers, and test managers new to Apache JMeter, or those who are looking to get a good grounding in how to effectively use and become proficient with it. No prior testing experience is required.

If you are a data analyst, developer, or simply someone who wants to use Hive to explore and analyze data in Hadoop, this is the book for you. Whether you are new to big data or an expert, with this book, you will be able to master both the basic and the advanced features of Hive. Since Hive is an SQL-like language, some previous experience with the SQL language and databases is useful to have a better understanding of this book.

A fast-paced guide to develop, test, and deliver real-time communication in your .Net applications using SignalR About This Book Build and test real-time apps in .Net using the new features of SignalR Explore the fundamentals and the new methods and functions in the latest version of SignalR along with developing a complete application from scratch A progressive, hands-on guide to gain an understanding of the SignalR framework Who This Book Is For If you are a .Net developer with good understanding of the .Net platform then this is an ideal book for you to learn how to build real-time apps using the SignalR framework. What You Will Learn Explore the basic knowledge and understanding of SignalR Get to know how to connect client to the server Connecting a client with a server and setting a hub Creating group connections together Understand how to have state in the client to have specific operations Securing SignalR connections How to scale SignalR across multiple servers Building a client for WPF Building a client using Xamarin targeting Windows, iPhone and Android Get to grips with monitoring the traffic in SignalR using Fiddler for Windows and Charles for OSX Setting up code to host SignalR using OWIN In Detail With technology trends, demands on software have changed with more and more skilled users. Over the past few years, with services such as Facebook, Twitter and push notifications on smartphones, users are now getting used to being up to date with everything that happens all the time. With SignalR, the applications stay connected and will generate notifications when something happens either from the system or by other users thus giving new opportunities to enter into this new, exciting world of real-time application development. This is a step-by-step guide that follows a practical approach helping you as a developer getting to get started with SignalR by learning its fundamentals. It will help you through building real-time applications using the new methods and functions in the SignalR framework. Starting from getting persistent connections with the server, you will learn the basics of connecting a client to the server and how the messaging works. This will be followed by setting up a hub on the server and consuming it from a JavaScript client. Next you will be taught how you can group connections together to send messages. We will then go on to know how you can have state in the client to handle specific operations like connecting or disconnecting. Then, moving on you will learn how to secure your SignalR connections using OWIN and scaling SignalR across multiple servers. Next you will learn building a client for WPF and building a client using Xamarin that targets Windows Phone, iPhone and Android. Lastly, you will learn how to monitor the traffic in SignalR using Fiddler, Charles and hosting SignalR using OWIN. Style and approach This is an example- oriented and comprehensive guide to learning the fundamentals of SignalR to build real-time applications. It will help you build real-time applications on the .Net platform in a step-by-step manner along with giving teaching techniques to deal with possible performance bottlenecks and other key topics.