Unity 5.x Cookbook - I just love Unity!

Can I just say I love you, Unity 5.x Cookbook?  You've come into my life at the perfect time for me to fall in love.  I've been using Unity 4.x for about a year now, I saw the release of Unity 5, and thought, "What?  A new version to learn?"  In walks Unity 5.x Cookbook in all your glorious insight and cookie cutter scenarios.  How could I not fall in love?

Okay, back to reality.  It is a great book.  But remember, this is a cookbook, with recipes.  Even if you don't know anything about Unity, you'll learn a great deal by the end. Not only will you understand how to perform basic GUI and animation, but you'll also learn about some of the new features Unity 5 has to offer.

You'll need to be able to read C# in order to get the full effect, so Google c# if you need a refresher before reading this book.

Starting in chapter 10 the author starts to really help you perform some advanced topics that most books gloss over or don't even cover. Things like communicating with a website and securing your game; as well as securing your source code.  It's a thorough book and if you follow the steps like I did, you'll be able to modify that knowledge with your own ideas in no time at all.  I love Unity and I now love this book because it will be a great reference for a long time.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Troubleshooting Guide - This may be all you need...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Troubleshooting Guide may just be all you need in your quest to wear the red hat. May I remind you that this is not a "getting started guide", but a troubleshooting guide.  This assumes you are somewhat familiar with Red Hat Linux and you may be having difficulty with a particular scenario.  If that's your situation, then this book IS your book.

The information is organized well with respect to topics and real world scenarios and the appropriate solutions.  I found that most of the principles described behind the scenarios could be generally used to troubleshoot other Linux environments as well; which makes this book even more valuable.

I think a book like this should be written for every OS that exists.

Learning IPython for Interactive Computing and Data Visualization, 2nd Edition - Amazingly Powerful

Learning IPython for Interactive Computing and Data Visualization, 2nd Edition shows amazingly powerful techniques to run high-performance data processing and visualize the results in a standardized manner.  It's impressive how much detailed information is packed into this book; which even includes a refresher on the python language and setting up the computing environment.  It even dives into advanced topics such as modifying the Jupyter kernel and adding your own magic commands to IPython.

I highly recommend this book if you've new to IPython or need a quick setup to understand high-performance and parallel computing.  Use of the Notebook has opened a whole new avenue of documentation resources for me. Well done!

Learning Javascript Data Structures and Algorithms - Valid for Anyone

Learning Javascript Data Structures and Algorithms: This book will be valid for a very long time. I loved reading it to freshen up on my algorithms, and the info on node and XAMP was helpful as well.  Every web developer should read this book and have it as a reference guide when planning the implementation of their Javascript methods. You learn the most common structures and algorithms you'll need for most of your applications.  Some you'll never use, but its important to know what they are and why to use other algorithms instead, which is discussed as well.  You get to know, but not limited to, stacks, queues, linked-lists, sets, dictionaries, hashes, trees, graphs, and sorting and searching algorithms.  You'd be hard pressed to find a need for other algorithms in the regular web development career.  Great book.

Real Time Analytics with SAP HANA

Real Time Analytics with SAP HANA is a great book. I was please to gain step by step written descriptions and visual (screenshots) depictions of how to setup and execute tasks from creating the database to setting up the various types of views to importing data and understanding optimization of SAP data.  This book was both helpful and thought provoking with detailed tutorial-like walk-throughs and the end of chapter "self study questions". I'm new to SAP HANA and this got me up to speed.

OpenStack Networking Cookbook - Get my head out of the clouds

OpenStack Networking Cookbook. I love this book. Be aware that it walks you through OpenStack Kilo version, you can still use most versions of OpenStack to complete the various tasks. In fact you can complete many of the recipes using DevStack, but not all.  I learned the nitty gritty of OpenStack cloud computing fast with this book.  If you are at all inclined to buy a book to help you out on your OpenStack adventure, let this be the book, or eBook.

Learning Underscore.js - awesome framework!

Learning Underscore.js is a perfect introduction to functional programming and ECMAScript 5.  I learned faster through comparing what I already knew in regular Javascript with the same function using Underscore.js methods.  Underscore.js is very powerful and I'm excited to make use of it in my own sites.  Though ECMAScript 6 is almost out, you'll still be able to use Underscore.js, but look for the updated Underscore.js library at that time.

I can see why frameworks that use Underscore.js, like Backbone.js, are so popular. Learning Underscore.js is an easy read with concepts plainly described for beginner and veteran js developers.

Mastering Python Forensics is Very Cool

If you need to know details about processes and how to extract data from hard drives or mobile devices, Mastering Python Forensics is the book for you. Though the Android tutorial uses Android 4.4.4 you can still use the walk through using the latest version.
This is a useful book with a lot of great information and python scripts.  He also tells you how to setup you environment in order to perform the data acquisitions and analysis to obtain sensitive data.  Everyone dealing in digital forensics should read this book and have it as a reference manual.  Great job!

I Love This Book!!! It Saved Me Tons of Time!!!! - Blender 3D by Example

This book is amazing! I've read a few other Blender books and they all incorporate similar features. But this book goes a step further and teaches you animation, modeling, rigging, texturing, sculpting, lighting, particles, fur, grass, trees, rocks, character design, compositing, shape keys for your rig, and all the rest of the tools blender offers in such a way that it also adds principles of good techniques. For instance, you'll learn traditional principles of animation, how to write a script for your fully animated scene, what story boarding is and how to create them, and using the video sequence editor to complete the full animation of your sequences. There is an amazing amount of great information within these pages. You will learn very useful and current techniques on how to create a 3D animated sequence from scratch. I wish I had this book a few years ago.

I am a mobile game developer (and a bunch of other things), and I often need 3D objects for my games. This book has given me the knowledge that I was looking for to create assets for my games. Sure it doesn't go into things like exporting for games, but it does discuss things like creating a re-topology of a high resolution model and correct UV mapping. Tons of other things too that help me inadvertently. I still needed things like creating an animated short and still images, so this is perfect.

This really is your one stop shop for using blender if you are new to the blender world, and even a good reference book if you are familiar with blender already. Sure there will be more advanced feature that you'll need to learn that this book does not have, but the fact that this book even goes into subsurface scattering (SSS) in advanced textures and how to create grass and fur, tells you that this is not just a simple beginner's book, you'll learn it all including adjusting the cycles renderer to make great films. I'm so glad I read this book, and so will you.

Odoo is Pretty Amazing

If you are new to Odoo version 8, then this book is definitely for you. The author gives a very hands on, visual (lots of screenshots) walk-through on everything you need to get from nothing to a full blown manufacturing operation - finances, admin/security and all. He goes through each module and explains how it affects the system when its installed and how to configure and use each one. It was a great resource in getting my wife's printing business up and running. There is still a lot to learn, but had it not been for this book, I would not have know what to do.

If you are an experienced Odoo user, you'll learn the new features that version 8 has to offer. He also makes notes of some of the differences in the sas (software as a service) version while walking through a the local install version. 

It's organized by module, so if you have an accountant that needs to learn the ropes, just point them at the accounting section of the book. If you want HR to follow a new process when finding, interviewing, hiring new employees, then point them at the HR module section. Tons of good information and tips available in this book.

I Love Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi Android Projects - This book covers exactly what you need to know and do in order to use an android smart phone (or even android stick) to communicate via wi-fi or bluetooth with the pi 2. All the Linux and Android commands are given to setup a truly usable environment for creating a great IoT devices. This book goes a bit further by helping you understand what issues you may have and how to overcome them or gives extra resources if it's outside the scope of the book. I learned how to remote manage the pi from android, install, configure, and manage mysql database, a webserver, read from GPS and a temperature/humidity sensor, and how to connect the pi to your car OBD-II and stream that data to a google doc spreadsheet using your phone as a mobile hotspot. It also includes the basic things like installing a media center, a file server, and a security camera. But the meat of connecting it all up is the car data logger. In order to do the reading and streaming from Android, you get to create an Android App using Android Studio.

This book may not be for everyone since the scenarios are so specific. For instance, I may not want Android to communicate with the pi through wi-fi or bluetooth, but some other connection. You'll need to figure out how to connect via a hard-wire/usb/other device on your own.

However, though I wish there were more chapters to this book related to other connection methods between the pi and Android, I found it still very comprehensive for the tasks it was attempting to teach me. You can literally sit down and follow the examples word for word (you may need to be a bit creative if you're not using the same hardware/software versions) and have usable environments. I love that this book is so hands on and not so much theory.

Packt Publishing Discounts!!! Get'em Quick!

A career as a software/hardware engineering is always a whirlwind when it comes to learning and keeping current on your skills. Just like an Olympic athlete, we need to be honing our skills every day; I'd even say that if you aren't learning a new language every year you will not be able to keep up with the coming trends. There are tons of resources out there that will help you, but I wanted to point out just one today: PackT Publishing - Skill Up. Every ebook and video Packt has ever created is currently $5 each - I don't know how long this will run. This is an amazing deal and you should at least look into it. These titles usually run for $20- $40 each for ebooks and $50 - $70 each for the video training! I have definitely purchased my share of training from them and they are always great.

Also, if you're not sure which skill you should be sharpening, then take a look at the Year in Review to find out what many professionals are doing.

Who Knew Python Machine Learning Could Be So Easy?

I recently read "Python Machine Learning" by Sebastian Raschka.  I loved it!(You can buy it at Packt or Amazon)

Technical, but not too much. Let's face it, machine learning algorithms are technical in nature. However, this book allows you to gloss over the actual technical details if you don't really need to understand them right away and view the implementation of the logic in the code snippets. Though, I must say, the presentation of the technical subjects are explained clearly and with supporting graphs and images to help visualize the concepts. It was a wonderful experience to understand the code, even though the theory was also given. This allows most people to jump right in and start writing in python. For the mathematicians out there, you can take the equations and verify them if need be.

The ideas build upon each other and just like teaching a child to talk, the quality of machine learning seems to be about getting good training sets for your algorithms. As such, Sebastian is good about giving in-depth, best practice steps on how to make sure your training data is clean and normalized, as well as your feature selection is relevant - which was great. You'll learn how to merge results from multiple data sets into a more thorough model in order to filter out weaknesses of various algorithms. You'll be able to predict future outcomes using regression analysis using techniques from statistics to look for patterns and anomalies, again, all explained in very understandable words. Though the content and speed of the book is all very good and relevant, the icing on the cake is in the last two chapters (which you need to have worked up to in the previous chapters); understanding and then creating a layered neural network to solve complex problems like hand written digit recognition. And to top it all off he teaches us how to make it more powerful using the Theano tool.

You also gain great insight into many uses of the python language, SQLite databases, implement it by developing a small web application during the process, and understanding some parallel processing - from loading large data sets and processing them to using math and science libraries to process the data without having to be a rocket scientist.

Another great benefit of this read is not just the programming and math techniques you'll learn, but the right questions you need to ask about your data to make the results useful - unsupervised learning. The data sets used in the book range from breast cancer subjects to political science and from movie reviews to processing topics in order to determine a particular bias and then on to image processing.

The only downside (if you can even call it that) is that there is a lot of math involved, but to his credit, Sebastian teaches it in such a way that you don't really need to understand the math equation to understand how the equation works. In essence he is saying, "You don't need to understand the laws of physics to build a house, but here are a set of tools to help you create a magnificent house."

The fundamental concepts I've learned have opened the door to an enormous amount of possibilities I could not have even thought of doing had I not read this book. I used to think that true machine learning was only for super geniuses. But now I feel like I have another set of tools I can use to perform nearly superhero tasks. Python Machine Learning will be a reference book I use for many years to come.

So Much Good Information - Python Web Penetration Testing Cookbook!

I just finished reading "Python Web Penetration Testing Cookbook" by Cameron Buchanan et al. (pick it up at Packt or Amazon)

Overall an excellent read! Easy to follow scripts presented in the point of view as a hacker (including subtle remarks toward those that use these techniques for ill-fated purposes). Cameron presents an idea, shows the python script and corresponding source contents for which this script works against, then describes the scripts steps, and then goes on to describe additional related things about this script. You could say that each script could build upon each other, but that's not totally true. The author makes sure they are really cut and paste recipes. He gives you the recipe and often a way to include it into a bigger, more comprehensive script - that builds upon each step as the book progresses. Being a cookbook, there is plenty of code examples for you to try out. This is not a book about theory, but rather implementation - so all the fluff is cut out and it gets right to the point.

The book also focuses most of the direct web page vulnerability testing (2-3 chapters) at php script as the web pages' source. This would have been nice to have a corresponding discussion related to aspx, jsp, etc. There is some discussion of other technology other than php, and I get that the book would have probably doubled in size if more common page source was discussed, but it is something to think about when reading. Create the same page in aspx or jsp and attempt if there is a similar vulnerability.

Don't worry though, there's plenty of scripts related to SQL injection, header processing, encryption, encoding, payloads, shells, and even how to report your findings. These items are not necessarily exclusive to a single technology, so you are not pigeon-holed into testing only a certain type of website/server.

This book is not about learning python so if you're new to it, and you really want to understand how to manipulate each recipe, then I suggest searching for a beginner python book. However, that being said, most average level programmers can understand the scripts presented without needing to reach out for a python book/video.

Being in the industry for over 15 years, I've seen a lot of tools you can buy off the shelf that tout the ability to do this same thing just by running a program. I think knowing what it actually does is key to really understanding your vulnerabilities rather than trusting someone else's process because after all, attack vectors change all the time and with this information you can easily change your scripts.

In conclusion, this book is perfect for a web application developer wanting to test her application or an IT person ready to see just how vulnerable their application is - all with the ability to report the findings to those who need to know where to plug the holes. This is a book I will be referring to during and after each project I work on.

WOW! I'm Very Impressed! - Stencyl Essentials

Just finished reading Stencyl Essentials by Richard Sneyd (pick it up at Packt or Amazon). I was a bit wary about yet another game creation tool that touted no coding necessary in order to create high quality games for iOS, Android, desktop, etc. So, I read this book and I'm happy to say that I'm very glad I did. Richard Sneyd has done an impressive job at creating a very fast, yet simple to grasp introduction and implementation of a full 2D side-scroller game. In particularl, he gives detail where detail is appropriate in order to help the user understand the "why", and then lays out the "how" in very easy to understand terms. The detail does not come in a lot of vast technical explanations about the underlying system, but rather very well placed analogies that, in my opinion, really helped me understand the tools; after-all, I think that's the whole point of the book (It gives you a well founded explanation of the essential ingredients in order to create a high quality and fun to play game). I had no idea Stencyl was such a powerful tool.
I highly recommend this book to anyone - beginner to expert. Though an expert game developer probably would not opt to use Stencyl since they would surely have their own framework setup already, this book really does a great job of convincing me to use Stencyl for some of my 2D games, and I will be using it. Thanks Richard!

Mastering Cocos2d Game Development - Great For Creating Your First Game Dev Pipeline

I just read "Mastering Cocos2d Game Development" and I was pleasantly surprised. (Get it at Packt or Amazon)
I'm impressed by the historical information the book gives you about other tools that are used to support a cocos2d pipeline. The first few chapters do a great job of giving the reader all the info they need to quickly and efficiently get a game framework up and running and out into testers hands for prototyping. The code examples are all for the most part clear and understandable for anyone familiar with objective-c/c++, but someone new to the language should also be able to learn how to write code using the same examples as long as they are not completely new to programming. Each line of code is not always discussed so if you are unfamiliar with objective-c, it may be best to review the basics in another book/resource first. There are plenty of visual diagrams and references that help the reader understand what is being discussed - this is a great benefit. The author also take special consideration that not everyone will be using the same workflow, so alternatives are given in these situations - which is a welcome benefit of this book.
I recommend this book for devs that want to get an app into the market fast, but the draw back is that the app being designed is not a 3D game or even a 2D side-scroller. Though the book does show examples of 3D games (Crossy Road, etc.) and does talk about elements of a 2D side-scroller, it really only covers 2D static playing fields (board game style) and does a good job of it. I must, however, add that the book adds polishing effects such as parallax scrolling for dept perception. This is all very cool and extremely helpful for creating a board game style app that helps the user feel like it's a bit 3-dimensional. All the setup and framework is still incredibly helpful even for 2D side-scrollers, but it's really teaching you a board game type of playing field.
In conclusion, If you need to learn how to create a board game style app for iOS, then I highly recommend it. If you are creating a side-scroller or 3D game, then this may be a good reference for setting up the basic framework and other tools that help create 2D graphics. But you will not finish this book with a working knowledge of how to create other style games.

The Unreal Engine and C++ - Two of the Most Powerful Tools in the Known Universe!

If you want to learn C++ to build a game, check out "Learning C++ by Creating Games with UE4".  (Get it at Packt or Amazon)
This is a book that creates a simple to learn bridge between learning a complex language and applying that knowledge to creating a game in Unreal Engine 4, which can have a steep learning curve. Learning C++ by Creating Games with UE4 was like a breath of fresh air. I must admit, I'm not a beginner to C++, but I read it as if I was; and from that perspective, it's a tremendously helpful book. Even if you already know C++, but don't know Unreal Engine 4, you will know them both at the end of this book. But after all, the book's primary focus it to teach C++, and secondarily teach you Unreal Engine 4. I love the way William Sherif uses analogies to describe principles of the c++ language, then apply that same principle to the UE4 environment.

After the first initial chapters spent in the syntax of C++, William gets right into learning the ropes, but gives great encouragement along the way. In addition, his tips are timely and valuable, not just fluff. I feel like I'm a much better C++ programmer and can now script great games in the Unreal Engine 4 because I chose to read this book. I'm hoping to release my first Unreal Engine 4 game soon. Thanks William!