Voice Applications for Alexa and Google AssistantVoice Applications for Alexa and Google Assistant is your guide to designing, building, and implementing voice-based applications for Alexa and Google Assistant. Inside, you'll learn how to build your own "skills" - the voice app term for actions the device can perform - from scratch.
In 2018, an estimated 100 million voice-controlled devices were installed in homes worldwide, and the apps that control them, like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, are getting more powerful, with new skills being added every day. Great voice apps improve how users interact with the web, whether they're checking the weather, asking for sports scores, or playing a game.
About the book
Voice Applications for Alexa and Google Assistant is your guide to designing, building, and implementing voice-based applications for Alexa and Google Assistant. You'll learn to build applications that listen to users, store information, and rely on user context, as you create a voice-powered sleep tracker from scratc ...
Introducing Markdown and PandocDiscover how to write manuscripts in Markdown and translate them with Pandoc into different output formats. You'll use Markdown to annotate text formatting information with a strong focus on semantic information: you can annotate your text with information about where chapters and sections start, but not how chapter and heading captions should be formatted. As a result, you'll decouple the structure of a text from how it is visualized and make it easier for you to produce different kinds of output. The same text can easily be formatted as HTML, PDF, or Word documents, with various visual styles, by tools that understand the markup annotations.
Finally, you'll learn to use Pandoc, a tool for translating between different markup languages, such as LaTeX, HTML, and Markdown. This book will not describe all the functionality that Pandoc provides, but will teach you how to translate Markdown documents, how to customize your documents using templates, and how to extend Pandoc's functional ...
JavaScript Frameworks for Modern Web DevelopmentEnrich your software design skills and take a guided tour of the wild, vast, and untamed frontier that is JavaScript development. Especially useful for frontend developers, this revision includes specific chapters on React and VueJS, as well as an updated one on Angular. To help you get the most of your new skills, each chapter also has a "further reading" section.
This book will serve as an introduction to both new and well established libraries and frameworks, such as Angular, VueJS, React, Grunt, Yeoman, RequireJS, Browserify, Knockout, Kraken, Async.js, Underscore, and Lodash. It also covers utilities that have gained popular traction and support from seasoned developers and tools applicable to the entire development stack, both client - and server-side.
While no single book can possibly cover every JavaScript library of value, JavaScript Frameworks for Modern Web Development focuses on incredibly useful libraries and frameworks that production software uses. You will be trea ...
Xcode TreasuresLearn the critical tips and techniques to make using Xcode for the iPhone, iPad, or Mac easier, and even fun. Explore the features and functionality of Xcode you may not have heard of. Go under the hood to discover how projects really work, so when they stop working, you'll know how to fix them. Explore the common problems developers face when using Xcode, and find out how to get the most out of your IDE. Dig into Xcode, and you'll discover it's richer and more powerful than you might have thought.
Get a huge productivity boost by working with Xcode instead of against it. Instead of hacky code fixes and manual processes, once you know the the why and how of Xcode's process, you'll discover that doing things Xcode's way makes your app development more elegant and less aggravating.
Explore the major features of Xcode: project management, building UIs with storyboards, code editing, compiling apps, fixing bugs and performance problems, unit- and UI testing, and source code managemen ...
Practical SecurityMost security professionals don't have the words security or hacker in their job title. Instead, as a developer or admin you often have to fit in security alongside your official responsibilities - building and maintaining computer systems. Implement the basics of good security now, and you'll have a solid foundation if you bring in a dedicated security staff later. Identify the weaknesses in your system, and defend against the attacks most likely to compromise your organization, without needing to become a trained security professional.
Computer security is a complex issue. But you don't have to be an expert in all the esoteric details to prevent many common attacks. Attackers are opportunistic and won't use a complex attack when a simple one will do. You can get a lot of benefit without too much complexity, by putting systems and processes in place that ensure you aren't making the obvious mistakes. Secure your systems better, with simple (though not always easy) practices.
Pla ...
Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and ElixirProperty-based testing helps you create better, more solid tests with little code. By using the PropEr framework in both Erlang and Elixir, this book teaches you how to automatically generate test cases, test stateful programs, and change how you design your software for more principled and reliable approaches. You will be able to better explore the problem space, validate the assumptions you make when coming up with program behavior, and expose unexpected weaknesses in your design. PropEr will even show you how to reproduce the bugs it found. With this book, you will be writing efficient property-based tests in no time.
Most tests only demonstrate that the code behaves how the developer expected it to behave, and therefore carry the same blind spots as their authors when special conditions or edge cases show up. Learn how to see things differently with property tests written in PropEr.
Start with the basics of property tests, such as writing stateless properties, and using the d ...
Unreal for Mobile and Standalone VRApply the techniques needed to build VR applications for mobile and standalone head-mounted displays (HMDs) using the Unreal Engine. This book covers the entire VR ecosystem including production tools, Unreal engine, workflows, performance and optimization, and presents two fully-developed projects to reinforce what you've learned. Media designers, CG artists and other creatives will be able to take advantage of real-time engine techniques and easy-to-learn visual scripting logic to turn their creations into immersive and interactive VR worlds.
Gear VR, the Oculus Go and other Android based VR HMDs are becoming exciting new platforms for immersive business presentations, entertainment and educational solutions. The Unreal engine, one of the world's most powerful and popular game engines, is now free to use and has become increasingly popular for real-time visualizations and enterprise solutions in recent years.
With Unreal's powerful blueprint visual scripting system, non-coders ...
Customizing Dynamics 365Gain an understanding of basic and advanced customizations in Dynamics 365 and learn how they can be effectively used to implement simple business requirements. This is a practical book for developers that explains the use of various Dynamics 365 features as well as use of advanced concepts such as Azure integration and custom development.
Customizing Dynamics 365 starts by explaining the business requirements of the example application, which will explain the platform features, and discussing why Dynamics 365 is the ideal platform for the solution. Next, you will set up your development environment and use the different customizations of the platform to implement the basic business requirements of the example application. Further, you will automate the business process and create advanced customizations with plugins and custom workflow activities. Towards the end you will learn more about Azure integration, reports and dashboards, portal development, and data migration techniques, ...
Learn Computer Vision Using OpenCVBuild practical applications of computer vision using the OpenCV library with Python. This book discusses different facets of computer vision such as image and object detection, tracking and motion analysis and their applications with examples.
The author starts with an introduction to computer vision followed by setting up OpenCV from scratch using Python. The next section discusses specialized image processing and segmentation and how images are stored and processed by a computer. This involves pattern recognition and image tagging using the OpenCV library. Next, you'll work with object detection, video storage and interpretation, and human detection using OpenCV. Tracking and motion is also discussed in detail. The book also discusses creating complex deep learning models with CNN and RNN. The author finally concludes with recent applications and trends in computer vision.
After reading this book, you will be able to understand and implement computer vision and its application ...
Exam Ref MS-100 Microsoft 365 Identity and ServicesPrepare for Microsoft Exam MS-100 - and help demonstrate your real-world mastery of skills and knowledge needed to effectively design, deploy, manage, and secure Microsoft 365 services. Designed for experienced IT professionals, Exam Ref focuses on critical thinking and decision-making acumen needed for success at the Microsoft Certified Expert level.
Focus on the expertise measured by these objectives: Design and implement Microsoft 365 services; Manage user identity and roles; Manage access and authentication; Plan Office 365 workloads and applications.
Exam MS-100 focuses on knowledge needed to manage domains; plan a Microsoft 365 implementation; set up and manage Microsoft 365 tenancy and subscriptions; plan user and data migration; design identity strategy; plan and manage identity synchronization with Azure AD Connect; manage Azure AD identities and user roles; manage authentication; implement MFA; configure application access; implement access for external users of Microso ...