Mask of Death

Medieval Tales

Micah Clarke

Moll Flanders

Mystery of the Chinese Ring

The Turkish Empire

On Liberty

Only a Girl's Love

A recipe for love! Dr Mikki McKenna’s dedicated her life to her patients determined never to fall in love. But restaurateur Jeff Sabatino can’t get compassionate Mikki off his mind. He’d move mountains for minutes with her…

Bring realism to your games by mastering post-processing effects and advanced shading techniques in Unity 2018 About This Book ? Learn the secrets of creating AAA quality shaders without writing long algorithms ? Master shader programming through easy-to-follow examples ? Create stunning visual effects that can be used in 3D games Who This Book Is For Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook is for developers who want to create their first shaders in Unity 2018 or wish to take their game to a whole new level by adding professional post-processing effects. A solid understanding of Unity is required to get the most from this book. What You Will Learn ? Understand physically based rendering to fit the aesthetic of your game ? Write shaders from scratch in ShaderLab and HLSL/Cg ? Combine shader programming with interactive scripts to add life to your materials ? Design efficient shaders for mobile platforms without sacrificing their realism ? Use state-of-the-art techniques, such as volumetric explosions and fur shading ? Master the math and algorithms behind the most used lighting models ? Understand how shader models have evolved and how you can create your own In Detail Since their introduction to Unity, shaders have been seen as notoriously difficult to understand and implement in games. Complex mathematics has always stood in the way of creating your own shaders and attaining the level of realism you crave. Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook changes that by giving you a recipe-based guide to creating shaders using Unity. It will show you everything you need to know about vectors, how lighting is constructed with them, and how textures are used to create complex effects without the heavy math. This book starts by teaching you how to use shaders without writing code with the post-processing stack. Then, you’ll learn how to write shaders from scratch, build up essential lighting, and finish by creating stunning screen effects just like those in high-quality 3D and mobile games. You'll discover techniques, such as normal mapping, image-based lighting, and animating your models inside a shader. We'll explore how to use physically based rendering to treat light the way it behaves in the real world. At the end, we’ll even look at Unity 2018’s new Shader Graph system. With this book, what seems like a dark art today will be second nature by tomorrow. Style and approach The recipes in this book contain step-by-step instructions, complemented with screenshots, code, and real-world examples.

Enterprise Agility is practical framework for enhancing Agility and equipping your company with the tools to survive. About This Book ? Prepare your company to navigate the rapidly-moving business world ? Enhance Agility in every component of your organization ? Build a framework that meets the unique requirements of your enterprise Who This Book Is For Enterprise Agility is a tool for anyone with the motivation to influence outcomes in an enterprise, who aspires to improve Agility. Readers from the following backgrounds will benefit: chief executive officer, chief information officer, people/human resource director, information technology director, head of change program, head of transformation, and Agile coach/consultant. What You Will Learn ? Drive agility-oriented change across the enterprise ? Understand why agility matters (more than ever) to modern enterprises ? Adopt and influence an Agile mindset in your teams and in your organization ? Understand the concept of a CAS and how to model enterprise and leadership behaviors on CAS characteristics to enhance enterprise agility ? Understand and convey the differences between Agile and true enterprise agility ? Create an enterprise-specific action plan to enhance agility ? Become a champion for enterprise agility ? Recognize the advantages and challenges of distributed teams, and how Agile ways of working can remedy the rough spots ? Enable and motivate your IT partners to adopt Agile ways of working In Detail The biggest challenge enterprises face today is dealing with fast-paced change in all spheres of business. Enterprise Agility shows how an enterprise can address this challenge head on and thrive in the dynamic environment. Avoiding the mechanistic construction of existing enterprises that focus on predictability and certainty, Enterprise Agility delivers practical advice for responding and adapting to the scale and accelerating pace of disruptive change in the business environment. Agility is a fundamental shift in thinking about how enterprises work to effectively deal with disruptive changes in the business environment. The core belief underlying agility is that enterprises are open and living systems. These living systems, also known as complex adaptive systems (CAS), are ideally suited to deal with change very effectively. Agility is to enterprises what health is to humans. There are some foundational principles that can be broadly applied, but the definition of healthy is very specific to each individual. Enterprise Agility takes a similar approach with regard to agility: it suggests foundational practices to improve the overall health of the body—culture, mindset, and leadership—and the health of its various organs: people, process, governance, structure, technology, and customers. The book also suggests a practical framework to create a plan to enhance agility. Style and approach Enterprise Agility is a step-by-step guide to facing change and uncertainty head-on. The books provides practical ways to apply Agile methodologies and boost Agility throughout a business.

Learn how to implement the reactive programming paradigm with C++ and build asynchronous and concurrent applications About This Book ? Efficiently exploit concurrency and parallelism in your programs ? Use the Functional Reactive programming model to structure programs ? Understand reactive GUI programming to make your own applications using Qt Who This Book Is For If you’re a C++ developer interested in using reactive programming to build asynchronous and concurrent applications, you’ll find this book extremely useful. This book doesn’t assume any previous knowledge of reactive programming. What You Will Learn ? Understand language-level concurrency in C++ ? Explore advanced C++ programming for the FRP ? Uncover the RxCpp library and its programming model ? Mix the FP and OOP constructs in C++ 17 to write well-structured programs ? Master reactive microservices in C++ ? Create custom operators for RxCpp ? Learn advanced stream processing and error handling In Detail Reactive programming is an effective way to build highly responsive applications with an easy-to-maintain code base. This book covers the essential functional reactive concepts that will help you build highly concurrent, event-driven, and asynchronous applications in a simpler and less error-prone way. C++ Reactive Programming begins with a discussion on how event processing was undertaken by different programming systems earlier. After a brisk introduction to modern C++ (C++17), you’ll be taken through language-level concurrency and the lock-free programming model to set the stage for our foray into the Functional Programming model. Following this, you’ll be introduced to RxCpp and its programming model. You’ll be able to gain deep insights into the RxCpp library, which facilitates reactive programming. You’ll learn how to deal with reactive programming using Qt/C++ (for the desktop) and C++ microservices for the Web. By the end of the book, you will be well versed with advanced reactive programming concepts in modern C++ (C++17). Style and approach The book includes real-world problems that you will solve with the reactive programming model. It highlights the way event processing has evolved in the programming world.

Build enterprise-grade microservice ecosystems with intensive case studies using C# About This Book ? Learn to build message-based microservices ? Packed with case studies to explain the intricacies of large-scale microservices ? Build scalable, modular, and robust architectures with C# Who This Book Is For C# developers, software architects, and professionals who want to master the art of designing the microservice architecture that is scalable based on environment. Developers should have a basic understanding of.NET application development using C# and Visual Studio What You Will Learn ? Explore different open source tools within the context of designing microservices ? Learn to provide insulation to exception-prone function calls ? Build common messages used between microservices for communication ? Learn to create a microservice using our base class and interface ? Design a quantitative financial machine microservice ? Learn to design a microservice that is capable of using Blockchain technology In Detail C# is a powerful language when it comes to building applications and software architecture using rich libraries and tools such as .NET. This book will harness the strength of C# in developing microservices architectures and applications. This book shows developers how to develop an enterprise-grade, event-driven, asynchronous, message-based microservice framework using C#, .NET, and various open source tools. We will discuss how to send and receive messages, how to design many types of microservice that are truly usable in a corporate environment. We will also dissect each case and explain the code, best practices, pros and cons, and more. Through our journey, we will use many open source tools, and create file monitors, a machine learning microservice, a quantitative financial microservice that can handle bonds and credit default swaps, a deployment microservice to show you how to better manage your deployments, and memory, health status, and other microservices. By the end of this book, you will have a complete microservice ecosystem you can place into production or customize in no time. Style and approach A step-by-step guide that enables readers to create a complete microservice ecosystem they can place into production or customize in no time.

Real-world examples of cross-browser, mobile, and data-driven testing with all the latest features of Selenium WebDriver 3 Key Features *Unlock the full potential of Selenium to test your web applications *Use Selenium Grid for faster, parallel running, and cross-browser testing *Test iOS and Android Apps with Appium Book Description Selenium WebDriver is an open source automation tool implemented through a browser-specific driver, which sends commands to a browser and retrieves results. The latest version of Selenium 3 brings with it a lot of new features that change the way you use and setup Selenium WebDriver. This book covers all those features along with the source code, including a demo website that allows you to work with an HMTL5 application and other examples throughout the book. Selenium WebDriver 3 Practical Guide will walk you through the various APIs of Selenium WebDriver, which are used in automation tests, followed by a discussion of the various WebDriver implementations available. You will learn to strategize and handle rich web UI using advanced WebDriver API along with real-time challenges faced in WebDriver and solutions to handle them. You will discover different types and domains of testing such as cross-browser testing, load testing, and mobile testing with Selenium. Finally, you will also be introduced to data-driven testing using TestNG to create your own automation framework. By the end of this book, you will be able to select any web application and automate it the way you want. What you will learn *Understand what Selenium 3 is and how is has been improved than its predecessor *Use different mobile and desktop browser platforms with Selenium 3 *Perform advanced actions, such as drag-and-drop and action builders on web page *Learn to use Java 8 API and Selenium 3 together *Explore remote WebDriver and discover how to use it *Perform cross browser and distributed testing with Selenium Grid *Use Actions API for performing various keyboard and mouse actions Who this book is for Selenium WebDriver 3 Practical Guide is for software quality assurance/testing professionals, software project managers, or software developers interested in using Selenium for testing their applications. Prior programming experience in Java is necessary.

Build optimized applications in Kotlin by learning how to make use of the standard library features the smart way Key Features *Get the most out of the Kotlin library to develop high-quality portable applications *Explore the powerful support for data processing and I/O operations *Discover ways to enhance your Android application development Book Description Given the verbosity of Java, developers have turned to Kotlin for effective software development. The Kotlin standard library provides vital tools that make day-to-day Kotlin programming easier. This library features the core attributes of the language, such as algorithmic problems, design patterns, data processing, and working with files and data streams. The recipes in this book offer coding solutions that can be readily executed. The book covers various topics related to data processing, I/O operations, and collections transformation. We'll walk through effective design patterns in Kotlin and you'll understand how coroutines add new features to JavaScript. As you make your way through the chapters, you'll learn how to implement clean, reusable functions and scalable interfaces containing default implementations. In the concluding chapters, we'll provide recipes on functional programming concepts, such as lambdas, monads, functors, and Kotlin scoping functions. By the end of the book, you'll be able to address a range of problems that Kotlin developers face by implementing easy-to-follow solutions. What you will learn *Work with ranges, progressions, and sequences in use cases *Add new functionalities to current classes with Kotlin extensions *Understand elements such as lambdas, closures, and monads *Build a REST API consumer with Retrofit and a coroutine adapter *Discover useful tips and solutions for making your Android projects *Explore the benefits of standard library features Who this book is for This book is for software developers who are familiar with Kotlin’s basics and want to discover more advanced features and concepts, especially those provided by the Kotlin standard library. It’s also ideal for experienced software developers who are familiar with the functional programming paradigm and other programming languages who want to switch to Kotlin. It will also help Java developers switch to Kotlin and integrate it into existing Java Virtual Machine (JVM) projects.

"'There is a plot, Harry Potter. A plot to make most terrible things happen at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry this year.'"Harry Potter's summer has included the worst birthday ever, doomy warnings from a house-elf called Dobby, and rescue from the Dursleys by his friend Ron Weasley in a magical flying car! Back at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for his second year, Harry hears strange whispers echo through empty corridors - and then the attacks start. Students are found as though turned to stone ... Dobby's sinister predictions seem to be coming true.

A solution-based guide to put your deep learning models into production with the power of Apache Spark Key Features * Discover practical recipes for distributed deep learning with Apache Spark * Learn to use libraries such as Keras and TensorFlow * Solve problems in order to train your deep learning models on Apache Spark Book Description With deep learning gaining rapid mainstream adoption in modern-day industries, organizations are looking for ways to unite popular big data tools with highly efficient deep learning libraries. As a result, this will help deep learning models train with higher efficiency and speed. With the help of the Apache Spark Deep Learning Cookbook, you’ll work through specific recipes to generate outcomes for deep learning algorithms, without getting bogged down in theory. From setting up Apache Spark for deep learning to implementing types of neural net, this book tackles both common and not so common problems to perform deep learning on a distributed environment. In addition to this, you’ll get access to deep learning code within Spark that can be reused to answer similar problems or tweaked to answer slightly different problems. You will also learn how to stream and cluster your data with Spark. Once you have got to grips with the basics, you’ll explore how to implement and deploy deep learning models, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) in Spark, using popular libraries such as TensorFlow and Keras. By the end of the book, you'll have the expertise to train and deploy efficient deep learning models on Apache Spark. What you will learn * Set up a fully functional Spark environment * Understand practical machine learning and deep learning concepts * Apply built-in machine learning libraries within Spark * Explore libraries that are compatible with TensorFlow and Keras * Explore NLP models such as Word2vec and TF-IDF on Spark * Organize dataframes for deep learning evaluation * Apply testing and training modeling to ensure accuracy * Access readily available code that may be reusable Who this book is for If you’re looking for a practical and highly useful resource for implementing efficiently distributed deep learning models with Apache Spark, then the Apache Spark Deep Learning Cookbook is for you. Knowledge of the core machine learning concepts and a basic understanding of the Apache Spark framework is required to get the best out of this book. Additionally, some programming knowledge in Python is a plus.

This book gets you started and gives you knowledge about AWS Fargate in order to successfully incorporate it in your ECS container application. Key Features *Gives you a quick walk-through over the Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS) *Provides an in depth knowledge of the components that Amazon Fargate has to offer. *Learn the practical aspects of Docker application development with a managed service Book Description Amazon Fargate is new launch type for the Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS). ECS is an AWS service for Docker container orchestration. Docker is the de facto containerization framework and has revolutionized packaging and deployment of software. The introduction of Fargate has made the ECS platform serverless. The book takes you through how Amazon Fargate runs ECS services composed of tasks and Docker containers and exposes the containers to the user. Fargate has simplified the ECS platform. We will learn how Fargate creates an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) for each task and how auto scaling can be enabled for ECS tasks. You will also learn about using an IAM policy to download Docker images and send logs to CloudWatch. Finally, by the end of this book, you will have learned about how to use ECS CLI to create an ECS cluster and deploy tasks with Docker Compose. What you will learn *Running Docker containers with a managed service *Use Amazon ECS in Fargate launch mode *Configure CloudWatch Logging with Fargate *Use an IAM Role with Fargate *Understand how ECS CLI is used with Fargate *Learn how to use an Application Load Balancer with Fargate *Learn about Auto Scaling with Fargate Who this book is for This book is for Docker users and developers who want to learn about the Fargate platform. Typical job roles for which the book is suitable are DevOps Architect, Docker Engineer, and AWS Cloud Engineer. Prior knowledge of AWS and ECS is helpful but not mandatory.

Understand the Ethereum platform to build distributed applications that are secured and decentralized using blockchain technology Key Features *Build your own decentralized applications using real-world blockchain examples *Implement Ethereum for building smart contracts and cryptocurrency applications with easy-to-follow projects *Enhance your application security with blockchain Book Description Ethereum enables the development of efficient, smart contracts that contain code. These smart contracts can interact with other smart contracts to make decisions, store data, and send Ether to others.Ethereum Projects for Beginners provides you with a clear introduction to creating cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and decentralized applications. As you make your way through the book, you’ll get to grips with detailed step-by-step processes to build advanced Ethereum projects. Each project will teach you enough about Ethereum to be productive right away. You will learn how tokenization works, think in a decentralized way, and build blockchain-based distributed computing systems. Towards the end of the book, you will develop interesting Ethereum projects such as creating wallets and secure data sharing.By the end of this book, you will be able to tackle blockchain challenges by implementing end-to-end projects using the full power of the Ethereum blockchain. What you will learn *Develop your ideas fast and efficiently using the Ethereum blockchain *Make writing and deploying smart contracts easy and manageable *Work with private data in blockchain applications *Handle large files in blockchain applications *Ensure your decentralized applications are safe *Explore how Ethereum development frameworks work *Create your own cryptocurrency or token on the Ethereum blockchain *Make sure your cryptocurrency is ERC20-compliant to launch an ICO Who this book is for This book is for individuals who want to build decentralized applications using blockchain technology and the power of Ethereum from scratch. Some prior knowledge of JavaScript is required, since most examples use a web frontend.

Enhance your skills in expert module development, deployment, security, DevOps, and cloud Key Features *A step-by-step guide to get you started with PowerShell Core 6.0 *Harness the capabilities of PowerShell Core 6.0 to perform simple to complex administration tasks *Learn core administrative concepts such as scripting, pipelines, and DSC Book Description Beginning with an overview of the different versions of PowerShell, Learn PowerShell Core 6.0 introduces you to VSCode and then dives into helping you understand the basic techniques in PowerShell scripting. You will cover advanced coding techniques, learn how to write reusable code as well as store and load data with PowerShell. This book will help you understand PowerShell security and Just Enough Administration, enabling you to create your own PowerShell repository. The last set of chapters will guide you in setting up, configuring, and working with Release Pipelines in VSCode and VSTS, and help you understand PowerShell DSC. In addition to this, you will learn how to use PowerShell with Windows, Azure, Microsoft Online Services, SCCM, and SQL Server. The final chapter will provide you with some use cases and pro tips. By the end of this book, you will be able to create professional reusable code using security insight and knowledge of working with PowerShell Core 6.0 and its most important capabilities. What you will learn *Get to grips with Powershell Core 6.0 *Explore basic and advanced PowerShell scripting techniques *Get to grips with Windows PowerShell Security *Work with centralization and DevOps with PowerShell *Implement PowerShell in your organization through real-life examples *Learn to create GUIs and use DSC in production Who this book is for If you are a Windows administrator or a DevOps user who wants to leverage PowerShell to automate simple to complex tasks, then this book is for you. Whether you know nothing about PowerShell or just enough to get by, this guide will give you what you need to go to take your scripting to the next level. You’ll also find this book useful if you’re a PowerShell expert looking to expand your knowledge in areas such as PowerShell Security and DevOps.

A comprehensive guide to design, build and execute effective Big Data strategies using Hadoop About This Book ? Get an in-depth view of the Apache Hadoop ecosystem and an overview of the architectural patterns pertaining to the popular Big Data platform ? Conquer different data processing and analytics challenges using a multitude of tools such as Apache Spark, Elasticsearch, Tableau and more ? A comprehensive, step-by-step guide that will teach you everything you need to know, to be an expert Hadoop Architect Who This Book Is For This book is for Big Data professionals who want to fast-track their career in the Hadoop industry and become an expert Big Data architect. Project managers and mainframe professionals looking forward to build a career in Big Data Hadoop will also find this book to be useful. Some understanding of Hadoop is required to get the best out of this book. What You Will Learn ? Build an efficient enterprise Big Data strategy centered around Apache Hadoop ? Gain a thorough understanding of using Hadoop with various Big Data frameworks such as Apache Spark, Elasticsearch and more ? Set up and deploy your Big Data environment on premises or on the cloud with Apache Ambari ? Design effective streaming data pipelines and build your own enterprise search solutions ? Utilize the historical data to build your analytics solutions and visualize them using popular tools such as Apache Superset ? Plan, set up and administer your Hadoop cluster efficiently In Detail The complex structure of data these days requires sophisticated solutions for data transformation, to make the information more accessible to the users.This book empowers you to build such solutions with relative ease with the help of Apache Hadoop, along with a host of other Big Data tools. This book will give you a complete understanding of the data lifecycle management with Hadoop, followed by modeling of structured and unstructured data in Hadoop. It will also show you how to design real-time streaming pipelines by leveraging tools such as Apache Spark, and build efficient enterprise search solutions using Elasticsearch. You will learn to build enterprise-grade analytics solutions on Hadoop, and how to visualize your data using tools such as Apache Superset. This book also covers techniques for deploying your Big Data solutions on the cloud Apache Ambari, as well as expert techniques for managing and administering your Hadoop cluster. By the end of this book, you will have all the knowledge you need to build expert Big Data systems. Style and approach Comprehensive guide with a perfect blend of theory, examples and implementation of real-world use-cases