Get to grips with building the foundations of an RPG using Unreal Engine 4About This BookUtilize a mixture of C++, Blueprints, and UMG to create a role playing game (RPG) efficientlyCreate reusable code chunks and elements that can easily be integrated into other gamesA cost effective, step-by-step guide to building and customizing an entire framework for your RPGWho This Book Is ForIf you are new to Unreal Engine and always wanted to * an RPG, you are this book’s target reader. The lessons assume you understand the conventions of RPG games and have some awareness of the basics of using the Unreal editor to build level.What You Will LearnProgram gameplay elements in C++ in UnrealCreate custom game data for entities such as players and enemiesCreate a turn-based combat engineDesign menu systems and blueprint logicCreate an NPC and dialog systemIntegrate equipment and itemsDevelop the foundations of a saving and loading systemIn DetailNow that Unreal Engine 4 has become one of the most cutting edge game engines in the world, developers are looking for the best ways of creating games of any genre in the engine. This book will lay out the foundation of creating a turn-based RPG in Unreal Engine 4.The book starts by walking you through creating a turn-based battle system that can hold commands for party members and enemies. You’ll get your hands dirty by creating NPCs such as shop owners, and important mechanics, that make up every RPG such as a currency system, inventory, dialogue, and character statistics. Although this book specifically focuses on the creation of a turn-based RPG, there are a variety of topics that can be utilized when creating many other types of genres.By the end of the book, you will be able to build upon core RPG framework elements to create your own game experience.Style and approachYou will follow a series of lessons detailing the elements that contribute to an RPG. By the end of the book, you will have considerably leveled up your ability to make your own game

Learn everything you need to build highly scalable, robust web applications using Angular release 4 About This Book ? Apply best practices and design patterns to achieve higher scalability in your Angular applications ? Understand the latest features of Angular and create your own components ? Get acquainted with powerful, advanced techniques in Angular to build professional web applications Who This Book Is For This book is for JavaScript developers with some prior exposure to Angular, at least through basic examples. We assume that you’ve got working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. What You Will Learn ? Implement asynchronous programming using Angular ? Beautify your application with the UI components built to the material design specification ? Secure your web application from unauthorized users ? Create complex forms, taking full advantage of 2-way data binding ? Test your Angular applications using the Jasmine and Protractor frameworks for better efficiency ? Learn how to integrate Angular with Bootstrap to create compelling web applications ? Use Angular built-in classes to apply animation in your app In Detail Got some experience of Angular under your belt? Want to learn everything about using advanced features for developing websites? This book is everything you need for the deep understanding of Angular that will set you apart from the developer crowd. Angular has introduced a new way to build applications. Creating complex and rich web applications, with a lighter resource footprint, has never been easier or faster. Angular is now at release 4, with significant changes through previous versions. This book has been written and tested for Angular release 4. Angular is a mature technology, and you'll likely have applications built with earlier versions. This book starts by showing you best practices and approaches to migrating your existing Angular applications so that you can be immediately up-to-date. You will take an in-depth look at components and see how to control the user journey in your applications by implementing routing and navigation. You will learn how to work with asynchronous programming by using Observables. To easily build applications that look great, you will learn all about template syntax and how to beautify applications with Material Design. Mastering forms and data binding will further speed up your application development time. Learning about managing services and animations will help you to progressively enhance your applications. Next you’ll use native directives to integrate Bootstrap with Angular. You will see the best ways to test your application with the leading options such as Jasmine and Protractor. At the end of the book, you’ll learn how to apply design patterns in Angular, and see the benefits they will bring to your development. Style and approach This book provides comprehensive coverage of all aspects of development with Angular. You will learn about all the most powerful Angular concepts, with examples and best practices. This book is everything you need for the deep understanding of Angular that will set you apart from the developer crowd.

Mastering Drupal can lead to a mighty website - discover what Drupal 8 can really do with hidden techniques, best practices, and more! About This Book ? The most up-to-date advanced practical guide on Drupal 8 with an in-depth look at all the advanced new features such as authoring, HTML markup, built-in web services, and more ? If you are looking to dive deep into Drupal 8 and create industry-standard web apps, then this is the ideal book for you ? All the code and examples are explained in great detail to help you in the development process Who This Book Is For This book is ideally suited to web developers, designers, and web administrators who want to dive deep into Drupal. Previous experience with Drupal is a must to unleash the full potential of this book. What You Will Learn ? Discover how to better manage content using custom blocks and views ? Display content in multiple ways, taking advantage of display modes ? Create custom modules with YAML and Symfony 2 ? Easily translate content using the new multilingual capabilities ? Use RESTful services and JavaScript frameworks to build headless websites ? Manage Drupal configuration from one server to another easily In Detail Drupal is an open source content management system trusted by governments and organizations around the globe to run their websites. It brings with it extensive content authoring tools, reliable performance, and a proven track record of security. The community of more than 1,000,000 developers, designers, editors, and others have developed and maintained a wealth of modules, themes, and other add-ons to help you build a dynamic web experience. Drupal 8 is the latest release of the Drupal built on the Symfony2 framework. This is the largest change to the Drupal project in its history. The entire API of Drupal has been rebuilt using Symfony and everything from the administrative UI to themes to custom module development has been affected. This book will cover everything you need to plan and build a complete website using Drupal 8. It will provide a clear and concise walkthrough of the more than 200 new features and improvements introduced in Drupal core. In this book, you will learn advanced site building techniques, create and modify themes using Twig, create custom modules using the new Drupal API, explore the new REST and Multilingual functionality, import, and export Configuration, and learn how to migrate from earlier versions of Drupal. Style and approach This book takes a practical approach with equal emphasis on examples and illustrative screenshots.

A guide to mastering Visual Studio 2017 About This Book ? Focus on coding with the new, improved, and powerful tools of VS 2017 ? Master improved debugging and unit testing support capabilities ? Accelerate cloud development with the built-in Azure tools Who This Book Is For .NET Developers who would like to master the new features of VS 2017, and would like to delve into newer areas such as cloud computing, would benefit from this book. Basic knowledge of previous versions of Visual Studio is assumed. What You Will Learn ? Learn what's new in the Visual Studio 2017 IDE, C# 7.0, and how it will help developers to improve their productivity ? Learn the workloads and components of the new installation wizard and how to use the online and offline installer ? Build stunning Windows apps using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) tools ? Get familiar with .NET Core and learn how to build apps targeting this new framework ? Explore everything about NuGet packages ? Debug and test your applications using Visual Studio 2017 ? Accelerate cloud development with Microsoft Azure ? Integrate Visual Studio with most popular source control repositories, such as TFS and GitHub In Detail Visual Studio 2017 is the all-new IDE released by Microsoft for developers, targeting Microsoft and other platforms to build stunning Windows and web apps. Learning how to effectively use this technology can enhance your productivity while simplifying your most common tasks, allowing you more time to focus on your project. With this book, you will learn not only what VS2017 offers, but also what it takes to put it to work for your projects. Visual Studio 2017 is packed with improvements that increase productivity, and this book will get you started with the new features introduced in Visual Studio 2017 IDE and C# 7.0. Next, you will learn to use XAML tools to build classic WPF apps, and UWP tools to build apps targeting Windows 10. Later, you will learn about .NET Core and then explore NuGet, the package manager for the Microsoft development platform. Then, you will familiarize yourself with the debugging and live unit testing techniques that comes with the IDE. Finally, you'll adapt Microsoft's implementation of cloud computing with Azure, and the Visual Studio integration with Source Control repositories. Style and approach This comprehensive guide covers the advanced features of Visual Studio 2017, and communicates them through a practical approach to explore the underlying concepts of how, when, and why to use it.

Leverage the power of Python to collect, process, and mine deep insights from social media data About This Book ? Acquire data from various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, GitHub, and more ? Analyze and extract actionable insights from your social data using various Python tools ? A highly practical guide to conducting efficient social media analytics at scale Who This Book Is For If you are a programmer or a data analyst familiar with the Python programming language and want to perform analyses of your social data to acquire valuable business insights, this book is for you. The book does not assume any prior knowledge of any data analysis tool or process. What You Will Learn ? Understand the basics of social media mining ? Use PyMongo to clean, store, and access data in MongoDB ? Understand user reactions and emotion detection on Facebook ? Perform Twitter sentiment analysis and entity recognition using Python ? Analyze video and campaign performance on YouTube ? Mine popular trends on GitHub and predict the next big technology ? Extract conversational topics on public internet forums ? Analyze user interests on Pinterest ? Perform large-scale social media analytics on the cloud In Detail Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Pinterest, and YouTube have become part of everyday life in a big way. However, these complex and noisy data streams pose a potent challenge to everyone when it comes to harnessing them properly and benefiting from them. This book will introduce you to the concept of social media analytics, and how you can leverage its capabilities to empower your business. Right from acquiring data from various social networking sources such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and social forums, you will see how to clean data and make it ready for analytical operations using various Python APIs. This book explains how to structure the clean data obtained and store in MongoDB using PyMongo. You will also perform web scraping and visualize data using Scrappy and Beautifulsoup. Finally, you will be introduced to different techniques to perform analytics at scale for your social data on the cloud, using Python and Spark. By the end of this book, you will be able to utilize the power of Python to gain valuable insights from social media data and use them to enhance your business processes. Style and approach This book follows a step-by-step approach to teach readers the concepts of social media analytics using the Python programming language. To explain various data analysis processes, real-world datasets are used wherever required.

Build Machine Learning models with a sound statistical understanding. About This Book ? Learn about the statistics behind powerful predictive models with p-value, ANOVA, and F- statistics. ? Implement statistical computations programmatically for supervised and unsupervised learning through K-means clustering. ? Master the statistical aspect of Machine Learning with the help of this example-rich guide to R and Python. Who This Book Is For This book is intended for developers with little to no background in statistics, who want to implement Machine Learning in their systems. Some programming knowledge in R or Python will be useful. What You Will Learn ? Understand the Statistical and Machine Learning fundamentals necessary to build models ? Understand the major differences and parallels between the statistical way and the Machine Learning way to solve problems ? Learn how to prepare data and feed models by using the appropriate Machine Learning algorithms from the more-than-adequate R and Python packages ? Analyze the results and tune the model appropriately to your own predictive goals ? Understand the concepts of required statistics for Machine Learning ? Introduce yourself to necessary fundamentals required for building supervised & unsupervised deep learning models ? Learn reinforcement learning and its application in the field of artificial intelligence domain In Detail Complex statistics in Machine Learning worry a lot of developers. Knowing statistics helps you build strong Machine Learning models that are optimized for a given problem statement. This book will teach you all it takes to perform complex statistical computations required for Machine Learning. You will gain information on statistics behind supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and more. Understand the real-world examples that discuss the statistical side of Machine Learning and familiarize yourself with it. You will also design programs for performing tasks such as model, parameter fitting, regression, classification, density collection, and more. By the end of the book, you will have mastered the required statistics for Machine Learning and will be able to apply your new skills to any sort of industry problem. Style and approach This practical, step-by-step guide will give you an understanding of the Statistical and Machine Learning fundamentals you'll need to build models.

Advanced analytics on your Big Data with latest Apache Spark 2.x About This Book ? An advanced guide with a combination of instructions and practical examples to extend the most up-to date Spark functionalities. ? Extend your data processing capabilities to process huge chunk of data in minimum time using advanced concepts in Spark. ? Master the art of real-time processing with the help of Apache Spark 2.x Who This Book Is For If you are a developer with some experience with Spark and want to strengthen your knowledge of how to get around in the world of Spark, then this book is ideal for you. Basic knowledge of Linux, Hadoop and Spark is assumed. Reasonable knowledge of Scala is expected. What You Will Learn ? Examine Advanced Machine Learning and DeepLearning with MLlib, SparkML, SystemML, H2O and DeepLearning4J ? Study highly optimised unified batch and real-time data processing using SparkSQL and Structured Streaming ? Evaluate large-scale Graph Processing and Analysis using GraphX and GraphFrames ? Apply Apache Spark in Elastic deployments using Jupyter and Zeppelin Notebooks, Docker, Kubernetes and the IBM Cloud ? Understand internal details of cost based optimizers used in Catalyst, SystemML and GraphFrames ? Learn how specific parameter settings affect overall performance of an Apache Spark cluster ? Leverage Scala, R and python for your data science projects In Detail Apache Spark is an in-memory cluster-based parallel processing system that provides a wide range of functionalities such as graph processing, machine learning, stream processing, and SQL. This book aims to take your knowledge of Spark to the next level by teaching you how to expand Spark’s functionality and implement your data flows and machine/deep learning programs on top of the platform. The book commences with an overview of the Spark ecosystem. It will introduce you to Project Tungsten and Catalyst, two of the major advancements of Apache Spark 2.x. You will understand how memory management and binary processing, cache-aware computation, and code generation are used to speed things up dramatically. The book extends to show how to incorporate H20, SystemML, and Deeplearning4j for machine learning, and Jupyter Notebooks and Kubernetes/Docker for cloud-based Spark. During the course of the book, you will learn about the latest enhancements to Apache Spark 2.x, such as interactive querying of live data and unifying DataFrames and Datasets. You will also learn about the updates on the APIs and how DataFrames and Datasets affect SQL, machine learning, graph processing, and streaming. You will learn to use Spark as a big data operating system, understand how to implement advanced analytics on the new APIs, and explore how easy it is to use Spark in day-to-day tasks. Style and approach This book is an extensive guide to Apache Spark modules and tools and shows how Spark's functionality can be extended for real-time processing and storage with worked examples.

If you are a Java developer or administrator with a technical background and want to install and configure Liferay Portal as an enterprise intranet, this is the book for you. In short, reusable recipes help you realize business goals as working features in Liferay. This book will also give you useful hints on how to easily improve the default functionality of the system and its performance.

If you are a Big Data enthusiast and wish to use Hadoop v2 to solve your problems, then this book is for you. This book is for Java programmers with little to moderate knowledge of Hadoop MapReduce. This is also a one-stop reference for developers and system admins who want to quickly get up to speed with using Hadoop v2. It would be helpful to have a basic knowledge of software development using Java and a basic working knowledge of Linux.

This book is aimed at anyone interested in creating impressive data visualization tools using modern graphics hardware. Whether you are a developer, engineer, or scientist, if you are interested in exploring the power of OpenGL for data visualization, this book is for you. While familiarity with C/C++ is recommended, no previous experience with OpenGL is assumed.

If you are a forensic analyst or an information security professional wanting to develop your knowledge of Android forensics, then this is the book for you. Some basic knowledge of the Android mobile platform is expected.

This book is intended for Python developers who want to use the principles of test-driven development (TDD) to create efficient and robust applications. In order to get the best out of this book, you should have development experience with Python.

This book is intended for developers who want to use features of the Kivy framework and develop multitouch applications. Prior experience with Kivy is not required although familiarity with Python is expected.

If you're an experienced Java developer and want to implement more effective methods of programming systems and applications, then this book is for you.

This book is intended for those developers who are keen to master the internal workings of Play Framework to effectively build and deploy web-related apps.

If you are a geospatial analyst who wants to learn more about automating everyday GIS tasks or a programmer who is responsible for building GIS applications,this book is for you. The short, reusable recipes make concepts easy to understand. You can build larger applications that are easy to maintain when they are put together.

If you are a proficient Cocos2d game developer who wants to enhance his or her game development skill set using Cocos2d-x to build different types of games, this book is for you.

This book is for developers who already know how to use Solr and are looking at procuring advanced strategies for improving their search using Solr. This book is also for people who work with analytics to generate graphs and reports using Solr. Moreover, if you are a search architect who is looking forward to scale your search using Solr, this is a must have book for you. It would be helpful if you are familiar with the Java programming language.

This book is intended for WordPress developers and designers who want to develop quality web applications within a limited time frame and for maximum profit. Prior knowledge of basic web development and design is assumed.

If you are a competent JavaScript developer who wants to design and implement tests using Jasmine in order to minimize bugs in the production environment, then this book is ideal for you. Some familiarity with unit testing and code coverage concepts such as branch coverage along with basic knowledge of Node.js, AngularJS, and CoffeeScript is required.

If you know JavaScript and want to start creating 3D graphics that run in any browser, this book is a great choice for you. You don't need to know anything about math or WebGL; all that you need is general knowledge of JavaScript and HTML.