A pragmatic companion guide to your Agile journey About This Book ? Make your team Agile by implementing industry-standard Agile techniques ? Assess scope, scale up efficiently ? Create the correct roles and identify the right candidates for your team ? Finish your projects faster and stay ahead of the curve Who This Book Is For If you’re a software developer or a project manager with little to no experience of Agile, but you want to efficiently implement it, this is the book for you. What You Will Learn ? Create a solid foundation that gives your team an Agile jumpstart ? Understand how to select and evolve practices to increase your team’s agility ? Use experiments to accelerate your team’s understanding ? Fine-tune your approach by incorporating aspects of Lean and Lean Startup ? Know how to foster an environment of continuous improvement and learning that will become self-sustaining In Detail This book will help you overcome the common challenges you’ll face when transforming your working practices from waterfall to Agile. Each chapter builds on the last, starting with easy-to-grasp ways to get going with Agile. Next you’ll see how to choose the right Agile framework for your organization. Moving on, you’ll implement systematic product delivery and measure and report progress with visualization. Then you’ll learn how to create high performing teams, develop people in Agile, manage in Agile, and perform distributed Agile and collaborative governance. At the end of the book, you’ll discover how Agile will help your company progressively deliver software to customers, increase customer satisfaction, and improve the level of efficiency in software development teams. Style and approach Think of this book like a manual, rather than a theoretical textbook. It’s packed full of visual ways to understand Agile, helpful tips to get you set up quickly, tried and tested solutions when challenges arise, and heaps of support to get the day-to-day tasks in Agile done. You’ll want to keep a copy on your desk, right next to your coffee cup.

Leverage the WiFi chip to build exciting Quadcopters About This Book ? Learn to create a fully functional Drone with Arduino and ESP8266 and their modified versions of hardware. ? Enhance your drone's functionalities by implementing smart features. ? A project-based guide that will get you developing next-level drones to help you monitor a particular area with mobile-like devices. Who This Book Is For If you are a programmer or a DIY enthusiast and keen to create a fully functional drone with Arduino and ESP8266, then this book is for you. Basic skills in electronics and programming would be beneficial. This book is not for the beginners as it includes lots of ideas not detailed how you can do that. If you are a beginner, then you might get lost here. The prerequisites of the book include a good knowledge of Arduino, electronics, programming in C or C++ and lots of interest in creating things out of nothing. What You Will Learn ? Includes a number of projects that utilize different ESP8266 and Arduino capabilities, while interfacing with external hardware ? Covers electrical engineering and programming concepts, interfacing with the World through analog and digital sensors, communicating with a computer and other devices, and internet connectivity ? Control and fly your quadcopter, taking into account weather conditions ? Build a drone that can follow the user wherever he/she goes ? Build a mission-control drone and learn how to use it effectively ? Maintain your vehicle as much as possible and repair it whenever required In Detail With the use of drones, DIY projects have taken off. Programmers are rapidly moving from traditional application programming to developing exciting multi-utility projects. This book will teach you to build industry-level drones with Arduino and ESP8266 and their modified versions of hardware. With this book, you will explore techniques for leveraging the tiny WiFi chip to enhance your drone and control it over a mobile phone. This book will start with teaching you how to solve problems while building your own WiFi controlled Arduino based drone. You will also learn how to build a Quadcopter and a mission critical drone. Moving on you will learn how to build a prototype drone that will be given a mission to complete which it will do it itself. You will also learn to build various exciting projects such as gliding and racing drones. By the end of this book you will learn how to maintain and troubleshoot your drone. By the end of this book, you will have learned to build drones using ESP8266 and Arduino and leverage their functionalities to the fullest. Style and approach This is an easy-to-follow guide with illustrations and technical de*ions to help you assemble your vehicle.

Discover new opportunities to empower your private cloud by making the most of the OpenStack universe About This Book ? This practical guide teaches you how to extend the core functionalities of OpenStack ? Discover OpenStack's flexibility by writing custom applications and network plugins ? Deploy a containerized environment in OpenStack through a hands-on and example-driven approach Who This Book Is For This book is for system administrators, cloud architects, and developers who have experience working with OpenStack and are ready to step up and extend its functionalities. A good knowledge of basic OpenStack components is required. In addition, familiarity with Linux boxes and a good understanding of network and virtualization jargon is required. What You Will Learn ? Explore new incubated projects in the OpenStack ecosystem and see how they work ? Architect your OpenStack private cloud with extended features of the latest versions ? Consolidate OpenStack authentication in your large infrastructure to avoid complexity ? Find out how to expand your computing power in OpenStack on a large scale ? Reduce your OpenStack storage cost management by taking advantage of external tools ? Provide easy, on-demand, cloud-ready applications to developers using OpenStack in no time ? Enter the big data world and find out how to launch elastic jobs easily in OpenStack ? Boost your extended OpenStack private cloud performance through real-world scenarios In Detail OpenStack is a very popular cloud computing platform that has enabled several organizations during the last few years to successfully implement their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms. This book will guide you through new features of the latest OpenStack releases and how to bring them into production straightaway in an agile way. It starts by showing you how to expand your current OpenStack setup and how to approach your next OpenStack Data Center generation deployment. You will discover how to extend your storage and network capacity and also take advantage of containerization technology such as Docker and Kubernetes in OpenStack. Additionally, you'll explore the power of big data as a Service terminology implemented in OpenStack by integrating the Sahara project. This book will teach you how to build Hadoop clusters and launch jobs in a very simple way. Then you'll automate and deploy applications on top of OpenStack. You will discover how to write your own plugin in the Murano project. The final part of the book will go through best practices for security such as identity, access management, and authentication exposed by Keystone in OpenStack. By the end of this book, you will be ready to extend and customize your private cloud based on your requirements. Style and approach This guide is filled with practical scenarios on how to extend and enhance OpenStack's functionality. We will be covering various installation and configuration platforms along with a focus on plugins and extending OpenStack's core functionalities.

A practical guide filled with case studies and easy solutions to solve the most common user experience issues About This Book ? Understand and fix the pain points of a bad UX design to ensure greater customer satisfaction. ? Correct UX issues at various stages of a UX Design with the help of different methodologies for fixing bad UXs ? See best practices and established principles in UX with case studies illustrating these practices and principles Who This Book Is For This book is for anyone confronted with a poorly designed UX. It is ideal for UX professionals who want to solve problems with existing UX designs, and UX designers who want to enhance their designs or analyze and rectify where they went wrong. What You Will Learn ? Learn about ROI and metrics in UX ? Understand the importance of getting stakeholders involved ? Learn through real cases how to fix bad UX ? Identify and fix UX issues using different methodologies ? Learn how to turn insights and finding into practical UX solutions ? Learn to validate, test and measure the UX solutions implemented ? Learn about UX refactoring In Detail Have your web applications been experiencing more hits and less conversions? Are bad designs consuming your time and money? This book is the answer to these problems. With intuitive case studies, you’ll learn to simplify, fix, and enhance some common, real-world application designs. You’ll look at the common issues of simplicity, navigation, appearance, maintenance, and many more. The challenge that most UX designers face is to ensure that the UX is user-friendly. In this book, we address this with individual case studies starting with some common UX applications and then move on to complex applications. Each case study will help you understand the issues faced by a bad UX and teach you to break it down and fix these problems. As we progress, you’ll learn about the information architecture, usability testing, iteration, UX refactoring, and many other related features with the help of various case studies. You’ll also learn some interesting UX design tools with the projects covered in the book. By the end of the book, you’ll be armed with the knowledge to fix bad UX designs and to ensure great customer satisfaction for your applications. Style and approach This book takes a practical approach, with case studies, best practices, and practical solutions to bad design

Grasp the fundamental concepts of deep learning using Tensorflow in a hands-on manner About This Book ? Get a first-hand experience of the deep learning concepts and techniques with this easy-to-follow guide ? Train different types of neural networks using Tensorflow for real-world problems in language processing, computer vision, transfer learning, and more ? Designed for those who believe in the concept of 'learn by doing', this book is a perfect blend of theory and code examples Who This Book Is For This book targets data scientists and machine learning developers who wish to get started with deep learning. If you know what deep learning is but are not quite sure of how to use it, this book will help you as well. An understanding of statistics and data science concepts is required. Some familiarity with Python programming will also be beneficial. What You Will Learn ? Understand the fundamentals of deep learning and how it is different from machine learning ? Get familiarized with Tensorflow, one of the most popular libraries for advanced machine learning ? Increase the predictive power of your model using feature engineering ? Understand the basics of deep learning by solving a digit classification problem of MNIST ? Demonstrate face generation based on the CelebA database, a promising application of generative models ? Apply deep learning to other domains like language modeling, sentiment analysis, and machine translation In Detail Deep learning is a popular subset of machine learning, and it allows you to build complex models that are faster and give more accurate predictions. This book is your companion to take your first steps into the world of deep learning, with hands-on examples to boost your understanding of the topic. This book starts with a quick overview of the essential concepts of data science and machine learning which are required to get started with deep learning. It introduces you to Tensorflow, the most widely used machine learning library for training deep learning models. You will then work on your first deep learning problem by training a deep feed-forward neural network for digit classification, and move on to tackle other real-world problems in computer vision, language processing, sentiment analysis, and more. Advanced deep learning models such as generative adversarial networks and their applications are also covered in this book. By the end of this book, you will have a solid understanding of all the essential concepts in deep learning. With the help of the examples and code provided in this book, you will be equipped to train your own deep learning models with more confidence. Style and approach A step-by-step guide filled with multiple examples to help you get started with data science and deep learning.

Learn continuous deployment and automation with code-signing, continuous testing, building, deploying, and releasing of your app. About This Book ? A practical guide on automating your mobile development pipeline with Fastlane, Jenkins, and Slack. ? Build, test, run and deploy your mobile application release with this end to end guide. ? Implement Continuous Integration, delivery, and deployment practices to optimize your application development workflow for faster and efficient release builds. Who This Book Is For This book is intended for mobile developers who are keen on incorporating Continuous integration and deployment practices in their workflow. What You Will Learn ? Harness the fastlane tools for the Continuous Deployment strategy ? Integrate Continuous Deployment with existing Continuous Integration. ? Automate upload of screenshots across all device screen-sizes ? Manage push notifications, provisioning profiles, and code-signing certificates ? Orchestrate automated build and deployments of new versions of your app ? Regulate your TestFlight users and on-board new testers In Detail Competitive mobile apps depend strongly on the development team’s ability to deliver successful releases, consistently and often. Although continuous integration took a more mainstream priority among the development industry, companies are starting to realize the importance of continuity beyond integration and testing. This book starts off with a brief introduction to fastlane—a robust command-line tool that enables iOS and Android developers to automate their releasing workflow. The book then explores and guides you through all of its features and utilities; it provides the reader a comprehensive understanding of the tool and how to implement them. Themes include setting up and managing your certificates and provisioning and push notification profiles; automating the creation of apps and managing the app metadata on iTunes Connect and the Apple Developer Portal; and building, distributing and publishing your apps to the App Store. You will also learn how to automate the generation of localized screenshots and mesh your continuous delivery workflow into a continuous integration workflow for a more robust setup. By the end of the book, you will gain substantial knowledge on delivering bug free, developer-independent, and stable application release cycle. Style and approach A step by step guide taking the readers through all the tools of fastlane.

A tutorial leading the aspiring Go developer to full mastery of Golang's distributed features. About This Book ? This book provides enough concurrency theory to give you a contextual understanding of Go concurrency ? It gives weight to synchronous and asynchronous data streams in Golang web applications ? It makes Goroutines and Channels completely familiar and natural to Go developers Who This Book Is For This book is for developers who are familiar with the Golang syntax and have a good idea of how basic Go development works. It would be advantageous if you have been through a web application product cycle, although it’s not necessary. What You Will Learn ? Gain proficiency with concurrency and parallelism in Go ? Learn how to test your application using Go's standard library ? Learn industry best practices with technologies such as REST, OpenAPI, Docker, and so on ? Design and build a distributed search engine ? Learn strategies on how to design a system for web scale In Detail Distributed Computing with Go gives developers with a good idea how basic Go development works the tools to fulfill the true potential of Golang development in a world of concurrent web and cloud applications. Nikhil starts out by setting up a professional Go development environment. Then you’ll learn the basic concepts and practices of Golang concurrent and parallel development. You’ll find out in the new few chapters how to balance resources and data with REST and standard web approaches while keeping concurrency in mind. Most Go applications these days will run in a data center or on the cloud, which is a condition upon which the next chapter depends. There, you’ll expand your skills considerably by writing a distributed document indexing system during the next two chapters. This system has to balance a large corpus of documents with considerable analytical demands. Another use case is the way in which a web application written in Go can be consciously redesigned to take distributed features into account. The chapter is rather interesting for Go developers who have to migrate existing Go applications to computationally and memory-intensive environments. The final chapter relates to the rather onerous task of testing parallel and distributed applications, something that is not usually taught in standard computer science curricula. Style and approach Distributed Computing with Go takes you through a series of carefully graded tutorials, building ever more sophisticated applications.

Leverage the power of Redis 4.x to develop, optimize and administer your Redis solutions with ease About This Book ? Build, deploy and administer high performance and scalable applications in Redis ? Covers a range of important tasks - including development and administration of Redis ? A practical guide that takes your understanding of Redis to the next level Who This Book Is For This book is for database administrators, developers and architects who want to tackle the common and not so common problems associated with the different development and administration-related tasks in Redis. A fundamental understanding of Redis is expected to get the best out of this book. What You Will Learn ? Install and configure your Redis instance ? Explore various data types and commands in Redis ? Build client-side applications as well as a Big Data framework with Redis ? Manage data replication and persistence in Redis ? Implement high availability and data sharding in Redis ? Extend Redis with Redis Module ? Benchmark, debug, fine-tune and troubleshoot various issues in Redis In Detail Redis is considered the world's most popular key-value store database. Its versatility and the wide variety of use cases it enables have made it a popular choice of database for many enterprises. Based on the latest version of Redis, this book provides both step-by-step recipes and relevant the background information required to utilize its features to the fullest. It covers everything from a basic understanding of Redis data types to advanced aspects of Redis high availability, clustering, administration, and troubleshooting. This book will be your great companion to master all aspects of Redis. The book starts off by installing and configuring Redis for you to get started with ease. Moving on, all the data types and features of Redis are introduced in detail. Next, you will learn how to develop applications with Redis in Java, Python, and the Spring Boot web framework. You will also learn replication tasks, which will help you to troubleshoot replication issues. Furthermore, you will learn the steps that need to be undertaken to ensure high availability on your cluster and during production deployment. Toward the end of the book, you will learn the topmost tasks that will help you to troubleshoot your ecosystem efficiently, along with extending Redis by using different modules. Style and approach This book is a rich collection of recipes that will come in handy when you are working with Redis. It addresses your common and not-so-common pain points, so this is a book of Redis that you must have on the shelf.

Join the virtual reality revolution by creating immersive 3D games and applications with Cardboard VR, Gear VR, OculusVR, and HTC Vive About This Book ? Develop robust, immersive VR experiences that are easy on the eye. ? Code 3D games and applications using Unity 3D game engine. ? Learn the basic principles of virtual reality applications Who This Book Is For If you are a game developer and a VR enthusiast now looking to get stuck into the VR app development process by creating VR apps for different platforms, then this is the book for you. Familiarity with the Unity game engine and the C# language is key to getting the most from this book. What You Will Learn ? Use Unity assets to create object simulation. ? Implement simple touch controls in your application. ? Apply artificial intelligence to achieve player and character interaction. ? Add *s for movement, tracking, grasping, and spawning. ? Create animated walkthroughs, use 360-degree media, and build engaging VR experiences. ? Deploy your games on multiple VR platforms. In Detail Are you new to virtual reality? Do you want to create exciting interactive VR applications? There's no need to be daunted by the thought of creating interactive VR applications, it's much easier than you think with this hands-on, project-based guide that will take you through VR development essentials for desktop and mobile-based games and applications. Explore the three top platforms—Cardboard VR, Gear VR, and OculusVR —to design immersive experiences from scratch. You’ll start by understanding the science-fiction roots of virtual reality and then build your first VR experience using Cardboard VR. You'll then delve into user interactions in virtual space for the Google Cardboard then move on to creating a virtual gallery with Gear VR. Then you will learn all about virtual movements, state machines, and spawning while you shoot zombies in the Oculus Rift headset. Next, you'll construct a Carnival Midway, complete with two common games to entertain players. Along the way, you will explore the best practices for VR development, review game design tips, discuss methods for combating motion sickness and identify alternate uses for VR applications Style and approach A project-based guide with every project built across chapters.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ? A Telegraph Book of the Year ? A New York Times Notable Book of the Year ? A Washington Post Book of the Year ? A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year ? A Slate Book of the Year ‘Probably Chabon’s greatest, a piece of sustained writing that will be hard to see outdone in 2017’ The Times ‘Entirely sure footed, propulsive, the work of a master at his very best. The brilliance of Moonglow stands as a strident defence of the form itself, a bravura demonstration of the endless mutability and versatility of the novel’ Observer ‘The world, like the Tower of Babel or my grandmother’s deck of cards, was made out of stories, and it was always on the verge of collapse.’ Moonglow unfolds as a deathbed confession. An old man, his tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, his memory stirred by the imminence of death, tells stories to his grandson, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried. Why did he try to strangle a former business partner with a telephone cord? What was he thinking when he and a buddy set explosives on a bridge in Washington, D.C.? What did he feel while he hunted down Wernher von Braun in Germany? And what did he see in the young girl he met in Baltimore after returning home from the war? From the Jewish slums of pre-war Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of a New York prison, from the heyday of the space programme to the twilight of ‘the American Century’, Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week.

David Walliams – comedian, actor and author – continues to take the children’s literary world by storm. His tenth novel, BAD DAD, was an immediate number one, following the triumph of THE MIDNIGHT GANG, the biggest-selling children’s book of 2016. WORLD’S WORST CHILDREN 2, which published in early 2017, spent four weeks at industry number one and eight weeks at the top of the children’s chart. They have achieved unprecedented critical acclaim – and RATBURGER, DEMON DENTIST and AWFUL AUNTIE have all won the National Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year. David’s books have now exceeded 100 non-consecutive weeks in the children’s number-one spot, and have been translated into 50 languages, selling more than 22 million copies worldwide. Born in London, Tony Ross went to art school in Liverpool. His cartoons have appeared in famous publications the world over. His first book, HUGO AND THE WICKED WINTER, was published in 1972. Tony has since written over 100 books and illustrated over 2000! His creations Towser and The Little Princess have been turned into TV series. David and Tony have worked on six bestselling picture books together, as well as eight of David’s phenomenally successful children’s novels – BILLIONAIRE BOY, GANGSTA GRANNY, RATBURGER, DEMON DENTIST, AWFUL AUNTIE, GRANDPA'S GREAT ESCAPE, THE MIDNIGHT GANG and BAD DAD. David and Tony also collaborated on the 2017 World Book Day title, BLOB, and the two blockbuster short story collections, THE WORLD'S WORST CHILDREN and THE WORLD'S WORST CHILDREN 2.

‘An existential thriller written in prose that points the way to the future’ Zadie Smith LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE ‘Fight Club for girls’Vogue A lives with B. B seems to be becoming more and more like A. If A’s boyfriend, C, likes A because A is A, but now B is the same as A, where does that leave A? And what has happened to the family across the street, who left one afternoon out of nowhere, covered in sheets with holes cut out for the eyes? ‘Comical, malignant and addictive’ Adam Thirlwell ‘As good a debut as I’ve ever read’ Zadie Smith ‘This book will unsettle you; this book will make you feel intensely alive’Buzzfeed

A small mining community in New Zealand is devastated when 'the snow tiger' (an avalanche) rips apart their entire township in a matter of minutes, killing fifty-four people. In the course of the ensuing enquiry, the antagonisms and fears of the community are laid bare, and a ruthless battle, for control of a multi-million pound international mining group, is exposed. The tension in the courtroom mounts as each survivor gives his graphic account of the terrifying sequence of events.

Tom Mangan is the affluent proprietor of a number of luxury hotels in the Bahamas, whose future looks even brighter with the injection of fifty million dollars provided by a well-heeled Texan family. The day Mangan clinches the deal with his friend, Bill Cunningham, should be the happiest day of his life, but when his wife and daughter go missing at sea and a series of disasters befall his hotels, he begins to uncover a conspiracy to ruin him.

Jan Willem Hendryk's legacy amounts to a staggering ?40 million - ?34 million to go to an agricultural college in Kenya's Rift Valley, and the remaining ?6 million to be divided equally between his only surviving descendants: Dirk, a South African, and Henry, a young drop-out living in California. But a number of suspicious circumstances emerge, including a clause in the will stating that Dirk must spend one month of every year in Kenya. What seems at first a simple matter of greed gradually assumes sinister proportions.

During the 1930s at Oxford, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams--remarkable friends, writers, and scholars--met regularly to discuss philosophy and literature and to read aloud from their own works in progress. Calling themselves the Inklings, their circle grew. It was in this company that such classics as The Lord of the Rings, The Screwtape Letters, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe first found an audience. Author Humphrey Carpenter was born in Oxford and was acquainted with Tolkien, Hugo Dyson, and several other Inklings. In this remarkable reconstruction of their meetings and momentous friendships, Carpenter brings to life those warm and enchanting evenings in Lewis' rooms at Magdalen College, when their imaginations ran wild. His account offers exciting insights into the influence these brilliant individuals had on each other's developing ideas and writing.

The best Christmas gift of all – love! Snowbound with Her Hero A Christmas holiday in the snowy Alps with her young son is a rare pleasure for single mum Crystal. But it means facing brooding Frenchman Raoul Broussard. With festive sleigh rides and a touch of mistletoe forcing her closer to Raoul, Crystal must decide how he makes her feel… Baby Under the Christmas Tree This Christmas Elle Austin has to go beyond the call of duty to keep rebel sportsman, Max Beasley, in check – even playing nanny to his son! Maybe it's the spirit of Christmas but Elle wishes he saw her as more than just an employee and that they could give Troy the best gift of all – a family! Single Dad’s Christmas Miracle Althea Johnson is only meant to tutor widower Clark Beaumont’s son. Not to fall in love with her boss. But, with her help, Clark’s kids begin to come alive and against the odds Althea hopes that when Christmas arrives there will be four stockings hanging over the fireplace…

Two sparkling, festive stories! Marry Me at Christmas To bridal boutique owner Madeline Krug, organising a Christmas wedding is fun – until she finds out she'll be working closely with the gorgeous brother of the bride, movie star Jonny Blaze. How will a small-town girl avoid falling for the world's sexiest guy over candlelit dinners and strolls through the snow? Especially with mistletoe hanging everywhere! A Kiss in the Snow Cupcake cook Nancee is stunned when search-and-rescue pilot Jesse strides into her kitchen. Once he’d loved her, but the last time she saw him was the night before he left her at the altar! Now he claims he’s back for good and Christmas tempts her to believe him… ‘Susan Mallery never disappoints.’ New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

Mark Haddon has written a number of successful picture books with HarperCollins, including Sea of Tranquility, illustrated by Christian Birmingham, and is best known for his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. He lives in Oxford with his wife and two sons.

Emma studied art at the Royal College of Art . She has worked as a freelancer for magazines, publishers and advertising agencies as well as teaching art for several years, but now dedicates most of her time to children's books.

Jolanda, la figlia del Corsaro Nero