Building Android Games with Cocos2d-x
Cocos2d-x is a multi-platform C++ gaming framework in active development maintained by Chukong technologies. It wraps all the essential elements needed for creating a game, making the task of game building very developer-friendly. Starting with a vital primer to get you up and running with your development environment, you will quickly dive in to exploring the latest version of this framework. You will understand major framework improvements to render objects at lightning speed, extend and maintain code easily, and improve the label API to add great functionality such as glow, shadows, and outlines to labels. Through the creation of a real game, you will explore the core components of development including Physics, enabling you to create realistic sprite movements, and particle systems to dynamically simulate explosions, fire, rain, and smoke, as well as exploring the sound engine to make your game more robust. Finish by integrating Cocos2d-x C++ code with native Android code to ...
Cocos2d-x is a multi-platform C++ gaming framework in active development maintained by Chukong technologies. It wraps all the essential elements needed for creating a game, making the task of game building very developer-friendly. Starting with a vital primer to get you up and running with your development environment, you will quickly dive in to exploring the latest version of this framework. You will understand major framework improvements to render objects at lightning speed, extend and maintain code easily, and improve the label API to add great functionality such as glow, shadows, and outlines to labels. Through the creation of a real game, you will explore the core components of development including Physics, enabling you to create realistic sprite movements, and particle systems to dynamically simulate explosions, fire, rain, and smoke, as well as exploring the sound engine to make your game more robust. Finish by integrating Cocos2d-x C++ code with native Android code to ...
Graph Databases
Discover how graph databases can help you manage and query highly connected data. With this practical book, you'll learn how to design and implement a graph database that brings the power of graphs to bear on a broad range of problem domains. Whether you want to speed up your response to user queries or build a database that can adapt as your business evolves, this book shows you how to apply the schema-free graph model to real-world problems. Learn how different organizations are using graph databases to outperform their competitors. With this book's data modeling, query, and code examples, you'll quickly be able to implement your own solution. ...
Discover how graph databases can help you manage and query highly connected data. With this practical book, you'll learn how to design and implement a graph database that brings the power of graphs to bear on a broad range of problem domains. Whether you want to speed up your response to user queries or build a database that can adapt as your business evolves, this book shows you how to apply the schema-free graph model to real-world problems. Learn how different organizations are using graph databases to outperform their competitors. With this book's data modeling, query, and code examples, you'll quickly be able to implement your own solution. ...
Learning JavaScript, 3rd Edition
If you're a programmer new to JavaScript, or even a beginner with little or no programming experience, this latest edition of practical book offers complete, no-nonsense coverage of this essential web development language. Learning JavaScript follows proven learning principles to help you absorb the concepts at an easy pace, so you'll learn how to create powerful and responsive applications in any browser. Rather than simply teach JavaScript as an imperative language, author Ethan Brown (Web Development with Node and Express) introduces functional and asynchronous programming concepts early and reinforces them often. This book also gives equal preference to JavaScript's use as a "traditional" language (with filesystem and console access) and to its use as a browser-based language. ...
If you're a programmer new to JavaScript, or even a beginner with little or no programming experience, this latest edition of practical book offers complete, no-nonsense coverage of this essential web development language. Learning JavaScript follows proven learning principles to help you absorb the concepts at an easy pace, so you'll learn how to create powerful and responsive applications in any browser. Rather than simply teach JavaScript as an imperative language, author Ethan Brown (Web Development with Node and Express) introduces functional and asynchronous programming concepts early and reinforces them often. This book also gives equal preference to JavaScript's use as a "traditional" language (with filesystem and console access) and to its use as a browser-based language. ...
Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP
If you need to build a scalable, fault tolerant system with requirements for high availability, discover why the Erlang/OTP platform stands out for the breadth, depth, and consistency of its features. This hands-on guide demonstrates how to use the Erlang programming language and its OTP framework of reusable libraries, tools, and design principles to develop complex commercial-grade systems that simply cannot fail. In the first part of the book, you'll learn how to design and implement process behaviors and supervision trees with Erlang/OTP, and bundle them into standalone nodes. The second part addresses reliability, scalability, and high availability in your overall system design. If you're familiar with Erlang, this book will help you understand the design choices and trade-offs necessary to keep your system running. Explore OTP's building blocks: the Erlang language, tools and libraries collection, and its abstract principles and design rules; Dive into the fundamentals of O ...
If you need to build a scalable, fault tolerant system with requirements for high availability, discover why the Erlang/OTP platform stands out for the breadth, depth, and consistency of its features. This hands-on guide demonstrates how to use the Erlang programming language and its OTP framework of reusable libraries, tools, and design principles to develop complex commercial-grade systems that simply cannot fail. In the first part of the book, you'll learn how to design and implement process behaviors and supervision trees with Erlang/OTP, and bundle them into standalone nodes. The second part addresses reliability, scalability, and high availability in your overall system design. If you're familiar with Erlang, this book will help you understand the design choices and trade-offs necessary to keep your system running. Explore OTP's building blocks: the Erlang language, tools and libraries collection, and its abstract principles and design rules; Dive into the fundamentals of O ...
High Performance Spark
Apache Spark is amazing when everything clicks. But if you haven't seen the performance improvements you expected, or still don't feel confident enough to use Spark in production, this practical book is for you. Authors Holden Karau and Rachel Warren demonstrate performance optimizations to help your Spark queries run faster and handle larger data sizes, while using fewer resources. Ideal for software engineers, data engineers, developers, and system administrators working with large-scale data applications, this book describes techniques that can reduce data infrastructure costs and developer hours. Not only will you gain a more comprehensive understanding of Spark, you'll also learn how to make it sing. How Spark SQL's new interfaces improve performance over SQL's RDD data structure; The choice between data joins in Core Spark and Spark SQL; Techniques for getting the most out of standard RDD transformations; How to work around performance issues in Spark's key/value pair parad ...
Apache Spark is amazing when everything clicks. But if you haven't seen the performance improvements you expected, or still don't feel confident enough to use Spark in production, this practical book is for you. Authors Holden Karau and Rachel Warren demonstrate performance optimizations to help your Spark queries run faster and handle larger data sizes, while using fewer resources. Ideal for software engineers, data engineers, developers, and system administrators working with large-scale data applications, this book describes techniques that can reduce data infrastructure costs and developer hours. Not only will you gain a more comprehensive understanding of Spark, you'll also learn how to make it sing. How Spark SQL's new interfaces improve performance over SQL's RDD data structure; The choice between data joins in Core Spark and Spark SQL; Techniques for getting the most out of standard RDD transformations; How to work around performance issues in Spark's key/value pair parad ...
Practical Android
Choose the best approach for your app and implement your solution quickly by leveraging complete projects. This book is a collection of practical projects that use advanced Android techniques and approaches, written by Android instructor Mark Wickham. Mark has taught a series of popular classes at Android development conferences since 2013 and Practical Android covers content from his most popular classes. Each chapter covers an important concept and provides you with a deep dive into the implementation. The book is an ideal resource for developers who have some development experience, but may not be Android or mobile development experts. Each chapter includes at least one complete project to show the reader how to implement the concepts. Apply JSON in Android; Work with connectivity, which covers all aspects of HTTP in Android; Determine if your server is reachable; Use lazy loading, a common pattern for most apps and which is not trivial to implement; Take advantage of remote ...
Choose the best approach for your app and implement your solution quickly by leveraging complete projects. This book is a collection of practical projects that use advanced Android techniques and approaches, written by Android instructor Mark Wickham. Mark has taught a series of popular classes at Android development conferences since 2013 and Practical Android covers content from his most popular classes. Each chapter covers an important concept and provides you with a deep dive into the implementation. The book is an ideal resource for developers who have some development experience, but may not be Android or mobile development experts. Each chapter includes at least one complete project to show the reader how to implement the concepts. Apply JSON in Android; Work with connectivity, which covers all aspects of HTTP in Android; Determine if your server is reachable; Use lazy loading, a common pattern for most apps and which is not trivial to implement; Take advantage of remote ...
Front-End Reactive Architectures
Learn how to use reactive architectures on the front-end. There are many technologies using a reactive approach on the back end, but this book teaches you how the reactive manifesto can be used to benefit your front-end programming as well. You will discover what reactive programming is, what the current front-end ecosystem looks like, and how to use a range of frameworks and libraries. You will also apply specific reactive architectures in your own projects. Each concept is taught with a mix of technical explanations and real-world code implementations. The future of front-end programming and architecture is reactive - don't get left behind: Add Front-End Reactive Architectures to your library today. ...
Learn how to use reactive architectures on the front-end. There are many technologies using a reactive approach on the back end, but this book teaches you how the reactive manifesto can be used to benefit your front-end programming as well. You will discover what reactive programming is, what the current front-end ecosystem looks like, and how to use a range of frameworks and libraries. You will also apply specific reactive architectures in your own projects. Each concept is taught with a mix of technical explanations and real-world code implementations. The future of front-end programming and architecture is reactive - don't get left behind: Add Front-End Reactive Architectures to your library today. ...
Build Better Chatbots
Learn best practices for building bots by focusing on the technological implementation and UX in this practical book. You will cover key topics such as setting up a development environment for creating chatbots for multiple channels (Facebook Messenger, Skype, and KiK); building a chatbot (design to implementation); integrating to IFTT (If This Then That) and IoT (Internet of Things); carrying out analytics and metrics for chatbots; and most importantly monetizing models and business sense for chatbots. Build Better Chatbots is easy to follow with code snippets provided in the book and complete code open sourced and available to download. With Facebook opening up its Messenger platform for developers, followed by Microsoft opening up Skype for development, a new channel has emerged for brands to acquire, engage, and service customers on chat with chatbots. ...
Learn best practices for building bots by focusing on the technological implementation and UX in this practical book. You will cover key topics such as setting up a development environment for creating chatbots for multiple channels (Facebook Messenger, Skype, and KiK); building a chatbot (design to implementation); integrating to IFTT (If This Then That) and IoT (Internet of Things); carrying out analytics and metrics for chatbots; and most importantly monetizing models and business sense for chatbots. Build Better Chatbots is easy to follow with code snippets provided in the book and complete code open sourced and available to download. With Facebook opening up its Messenger platform for developers, followed by Microsoft opening up Skype for development, a new channel has emerged for brands to acquire, engage, and service customers on chat with chatbots. ...
C Quick Syntax Reference
The C Quick Syntax Reference is a condensed code and syntax reference to the popular C programming language, which has enjoyed some resurgence of late. C's efficiency makes it a popular choice in a wide variety of applications and operating systems with special applicability to, for instance, wearables, game programming, system level programming, embedded device/firmware programming and in Arduino and related electronics hobbies. This book presents the essential C syntax in a well-organized format that can be used as a quick and handy reference. You won't find any technical jargon, bloated samples, drawn out history lessons, or witty stories in this book. What you will find is a language reference that is concise, to the point and highly accessible. The book is packed with useful information and is a must-have for any C programmer. ...
The C Quick Syntax Reference is a condensed code and syntax reference to the popular C programming language, which has enjoyed some resurgence of late. C's efficiency makes it a popular choice in a wide variety of applications and operating systems with special applicability to, for instance, wearables, game programming, system level programming, embedded device/firmware programming and in Arduino and related electronics hobbies. This book presents the essential C syntax in a well-organized format that can be used as a quick and handy reference. You won't find any technical jargon, bloated samples, drawn out history lessons, or witty stories in this book. What you will find is a language reference that is concise, to the point and highly accessible. The book is packed with useful information and is a must-have for any C programmer. ...
C++ 14 Quick Syntax Reference, 2nd Edition
This updated handy quick C++ 14 guide is a condensed code and syntax reference based on the newly updated C++ 14 release of the popular programming language. It presents the essential C++ syntax in a well-organized format that can be used as a handy reference. You won't find any technical jargon, bloated samples, drawn out history lessons, or witty stories in this book. What you will find is a language reference that is concise, to the point and highly accessible. The book is packed with useful information and is a must-have for any C++ programmer. In the C++ 14 Quick Syntax Reference, Second Edition, you will find a concise reference to the C++ 14 language syntax. It has short, simple, and focused code examples. This book includes a well laid out table of contents and a comprehensive index allowing for easy review. ...
This updated handy quick C++ 14 guide is a condensed code and syntax reference based on the newly updated C++ 14 release of the popular programming language. It presents the essential C++ syntax in a well-organized format that can be used as a handy reference. You won't find any technical jargon, bloated samples, drawn out history lessons, or witty stories in this book. What you will find is a language reference that is concise, to the point and highly accessible. The book is packed with useful information and is a must-have for any C++ programmer. In the C++ 14 Quick Syntax Reference, Second Edition, you will find a concise reference to the C++ 14 language syntax. It has short, simple, and focused code examples. This book includes a well laid out table of contents and a comprehensive index allowing for easy review. ...