Computer & IT

A self-contained and practical introduction that assumes no prior knowledge of programming or machine learning.

Comprehend the mysteries--and the amazing potential--of quantum computingQuantum computing has the promise to be the next huge thing in technology. How do we know that? Look at how much the big players in tech are investing in the technology. Quantum Computing For Dummies preps you for the amazing changes that are coming with the world of computing built on the phenomena of quantum mechanics. Need to know what is it and how does it work? This easy-to-understand book breaks it down and answers your most pressing questions. Get a better understanding of how quantum computing is revolutionizing networking, data management, cryptography, and artificial intelligence in ways that would have previously been unthinkable. With a Dummies guide by your side, you'll get a primer on the inner workings and practical applications of quantum computers.* Learn the difference binary and quantum computers* Discover which industries will be most influenced by quantum computing* See how quantum improves encryption and enables business* Take a look at how quantum is applied in big data and AIFor technologists and IT pros interested in getting on board the quantum train--plus anyone who's quantum-curious--this Dummies guide is a must-have.

"Davis addresses the "screen time" debate by recognizing that children's experiences of technology and social relationships are qualitatively distinct at different stages of development"--

*Apple Book of the Month for January*The incredible true story of Ana Montes, the most damaging female spy in US history, drawing upon never-before-seen material and to be published upon her release from prison, for readers of Agent Sonya and A Woman of No Importance.Just days after the 9-11 attacks, a senior Pentagon analyst eased her red Toyota Echo into traffic and headed to work. She never saw the undercover cars tracking her every turn. As she settled into her cubicle on the 6th floor of the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington, FBI Agents and twitchy DIA officers were hiding in nearby offices. For this was the day that Ana Montes--the US Intelligence Community superstar who had just won a prestigious fellowship at the CIA--was to be arrested and publicly exposed as a secret agent for Cuba.Like spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen before her, Ana Montes blindsided her colleagues with brazen acts of treason. For nearly 17 years, Montes succeeded in two high-stress jobs. By day, she was one of the government's top Cuba experts, a buttoned-down GS-14 with shockingly easy access to classified documents. By night, she was on the clock for Fidel Castro, listening to coded messages over shortwave radio, passing US secrets to handlers in local restaurants, and slipping into Havana wearing a wig. Montes didn't just deceive her country. Her betrayal was intensely personal. Her mercurial father was a former US Army Colonel. Her brother and sister-in-law were FBI Special Agents. And her only sister, Lucy, also worked her entire career for the Bureau. The highlight of her distinguished 31 years as a Miami-based language specialist: Helping the FBI flush Cuban spies out of the United States. Little did Lucy or her family know that the greatest Cuban spy of all was sitting right next to them at Thanksgivings, baptisms, and weddings.In Code Name Blue Wren, investigative journalist Jim Popkin weaves the tale of two sisters who chose two very different paths, plus the unsung heroes who had to fight to bring Ana to justice. With exclusive access to a "Secret" CIA behavioral profile of Ana, family memoirs, and Ana's incriminating letters from prison, Popkin reveals the making of a traitor-a woman labelled "one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history" by America's top counter-intelligence official.After more than two decades in federal prison, Montes will be freed in January 2023. Code Name Blue Wren is a thrilling detective tale, an insider's look at the clandestine world of espionage, and an intimate exploration of the dark side of betrayal.

Reinforcement learning is a learning paradigm concerned with learning to control a system so as to maximize a numerical performance measure that expresses a long-term objective. What distinguishes reinforcement learning from supervised learning is that only partial feedback is given to the learner about the learner's predictions. Further, the predictions may have long term effects through influencing the future state of the controlled system. Thus, time plays a special role. The goal in reinforcement learning is to develop efficient learning algorithms, as well as to understand the algorithms' merits and limitations. Reinforcement learning is of great interest because of the large number of practical applications that it can be used to address, ranging from problems in artificial intelligence to operations research or control engineering. In this book, we focus on those algorithms of reinforcement learning that build on the powerful theory of dynamic programming. We give a fairly comprehensive catalog of learning problems, describe the core ideas, note a large number of state of the art algorithms, followed by the discussion of their theoretical properties and limitations. Table of Contents: Markov Decision Processes / Value Prediction Problems / Control / For Further Exploration

Ready to master Python? Learn to write effective code, whether you're a beginner or a professional programmer. Review core Python concepts, including functions, modularization, and object orientation and walk through the available data types. Then dive into more advanced topics, such as using Django and working with GUIs. With plenty of code examples throughout, this hands-on reference guide has everything you need to become proficient in Python!Highlights include:1) Functions2) Methods3) Attributes4) Data types5) GUIs6) Debugging7) Network communication8) Modularization9) Object orientation10) Iterators11) Generators12) Exception handling

Deploy and manage industry-leading PAN-OS 10.x solutions to secure your users and infrastructureKey FeaturesUnderstand how to optimally use PAN-OS featuresBuild firewall solutions to safeguard local, cloud, and mobile networksProtect your infrastructure and users by implementing robust threat prevention solutionsBook DescriptionPalo Alto Networks' integrated platform makes it easy to manage network and cloud security along with endpoint protection and a wide range of security services.This book is an end-to-end guide to configure firewalls and deploy them in your network infrastructure. You will see how to quickly set up, configure and understand the technology, and troubleshoot any issues that may occur. This book will serve as your go-to reference for everything from setting up to troubleshooting complex issues. You will learn your way around the web interface and command-line structure, understand how the technology works so you can confidently predict the expected behavior, and successfully troubleshoot any anomalies you may encounter. Finally, you will see how to deploy firewalls in a cloud environment, and special or unique considerations when setting them to protect resources.By the end of this book, for your configuration setup you will instinctively know how to approach challenges, find the resources you need, and solve most issues efficiently.What you will learnExplore your way around the web interface and command lineDiscover the core technologies and see how to maximize your potential in your networkIdentify best practices and important considerations when configuring a security policyConnect to a freshly booted appliance or VM via a web interface or command-line interfaceGet your firewall up and running with a rudimentary but rigid configurationGain insight into encrypted sessions by setting up SSL decryptionTroubleshoot common issues, and deep-dive into flow analyticsConfigure the GlobalProtect VPN for remote workers as well as site-to-site VPNWho this book is forThe book is for network and security professionals, and administrators who want to bring in the power of Palo Alto Networks and firewalls to secure their networks. Engineers should have a good grasp of networking and routing protocols, basic knowledge of stateful or next-generation firewalls is helpful but not required.Table of ContentsUnderstanding the Core TechnologiesSetting Up a New DeviceBuilding Strong PoliciesTaking Control of SessionsServices and Operational ModesIdentifying Users and Controlling AccessManaging Firewalls through PanoramaUpgrading Firewalls and PanoramaLogging and ReportingVirtual Private NetworksAdvanced ProtectionTroubleshooting Common Session IssuesA Deep Dive into TroubleshootingCloud based firewall deploymentSupporting Tools

This practical book provides a comprehensive overview of troubleshooting and performance tuning best practices for Microsoft SQL Server. Database engineers, including database developers and administrators, will learn how to identify performance issues, troubleshoot the system in a holistic fashion, and properly prioritize tuning efforts to attain the best system performance possible.Author Dmitri Korotkevitch, Microsoft Data Platform MVP and Microsoft Certified Master (MCM), explains the interdependencies between SQL Server database components. You'll learn how to quickly diagnose your system and discover the root cause of any issue. Techniques in this book are compatible with all versions of SQL Server and cover both on-premises and cloud-based SQL Server installations.Discover how performance issues present themselves in SQL ServerLearn about SQL Server diagnostic tools, methods, and technologiesPerform health checks on SQL Server installationsLearn the dependencies between SQL Server componentsTune SQL Server to improve performance and reduce bottlenecksDetect poorly optimized queries and inefficiencies in query execution plansFind inefficient indexes and common database design issuesUse these techniques with Microsoft Azure SQL databases, Azure SQL Managed Instances, and Amazon RDS for SQL Server

Get up to speed on Git for tracking, branching, merging, and managing code revisions. Through a series of step-by-step tutorials, this practical guide takes you quickly from Git fundamentals to advanced techniques, and provides friendly yet rigorous advice for navigating the many functions of this open source version control system.This thoroughly revised edition also includes tips for manipulating trees, extended coverage of the reflog and stash, and a complete introduction to the GitHub repository. Git lets you manage code development in a virtually endless variety of ways, once you understand how to harness the systems flexibility. This book shows you how.Learn how to use Git for several real-world development scenariosGain insight into Gits common-use cases, initial tasks, and basic functionsUse the system for both centralized and distributed version controlLearn how to manage merges, conflicts, patches, and diffsApply advanced techniques such as rebasing, hooks, and ways to handle submodulesInteract with Subversion (SVN) repositoriesincluding SVN to Git conversionsNavigate, use, and contribute to open source projects though GitHub

Welcome to the future, where you can talk with the digital things around you: voice assistants, chatbots, and more. But these interactions can be unhelpful and frustrating-sometimes even offensive or biased. Conversations with Things teaches you how to design conversations that are useful, ethical, and humancenteredbecause everyone deserves to be understood, especially you.

When it comes to the climate, we don't need more marketing or anxiety. We need established facts and a plan for collective action. The climate is the fundamental issue of our time, and now we face a critical decision. Whether to be optimistic or fatalistic, whether to profess skepticism or to take action. Yet it seems we can barely agree on what is really going on, let alone what needs to be done. We urgently need facts, not opinions. Insights, not statistics. And a shift from thinking about climate change as a "me" problem to a "we" problem. The Carbon Almanac is a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration between hundreds of writers, researchers, thinkers, and illustrators that focuses on what we know, what has come before, and what might happen next. Drawing on over 1,000 data points, the book uses cartoons, quotes, illustrations, tables, histories, and articles to lay out carbon's impact on our food system, ocean acidity, agriculture, energy, biodiversity, extreme weather events, the economy, human health, and best and worst-case scenarios. Visually engaging and built to share, The Carbon Almanac is the definitive source for facts and the basis for a global movement to fight climate change. This isn't what the oil companies, marketers, activists, or politicians want you to believe. This is what's really happening, right now. Our planet is in trouble, and no one concerned group, corporation, country, or hemisphere can address this on its own. Self-interest only increases the problem. We are in this together. And it's not too late for concerted, collective action for change.

Artificial Intelligence and Music Ecosystem highlights the opportunities and rewards associated with the application of AI in the creative arts.

Quickly and efficiently prepare for the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification with the proven Sybex methodIn the newly updated Second Edition of Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Study Guide, expert engineer and tech educator Dan Sullivan delivers an essential handbook for anyone preparing for the challenging Associate Cloud Engineer exam offered by Google and for those seeking to upgrade their Google Cloud engineering skillset.The book provides readers with coverage of every domain and competency tested by the Associate Cloud Engineer exam, including how to select the right Google compute service from the wide variety of choices, how to choose the best storage option for your services, and how to implement appropriate security controls and network functionality.This guide also offers:* A strong emphasis on transforming readers into competent, job-ready applicants, with a focus on building skills in high demand by contemporary employers* Concrete test-taking strategies, techniques, and tips to help readers conquer exam anxiety* Complimentary access to a comprehensive online learning environment, complete with practice testsA must-have resource for practicing and aspiring Google Cloud engineers, Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Study Guide allows you to prepare for this challenging certification efficiently and completely.

"The most trusted explainer of the most mind-boggling concepts pulls back the veil of mystery that has too long cloaked the most valuable building blocks of modern science. Sean Carroll, with his genius for making complex notions entertaining, presents in his uniquely lucid voice the fundamental ideas informing the modern physics of reality. Physics offers deep insights into the workings of the universe but those insights come in the form of equations that often look like gobbledygook. Sean Carroll shows that they are really like meaningful poems that can help us fly over sierras to discover a miraculous multidimensional landscape alive with radiant giants, warped space-time, and bewilderingly powerful forces. High school calculus is itself a centuries-old marvel as worthy of our gaze as the Mona Lisa. And it may come as a surprise the extent to which all our most cutting-edge ideas about black holes are built on the math calculus enables. No one else could so smoothly guide readers to grasping the very equation Einstein used to describe his theory of general relativity. In the tradition of the legendary Richard Feynman lectures presented sixty years ago, this book is an inspiring, dazzling introduction to a way of seeing that will resonate across cultural and generational boundaries for many years to come"--

An argument for bold action to halt climate destruction, adapted for young people from Andreas Malm's best-selling book by an experienced educator.

"Every Action Matters will lay out the issues facing the planet and offer up 100 important actions that readers can take to help slow the adverse affects of climate change. Each action will get a spread and be accompanied by an infographic, statistic, or display quote to provide visual impact to the topic at hand"--

SOLIDWORKS 2022: A Power Guide for Beginners and Intermediate Users textbook has been designed for instructor-led courses as well as self-paced learning. It is intended to help engineers and designers interested in learning SOLIDWORKS for creating 3D mechanical design. This textbook is a great help for new SOLIDWORKS users and a great teaching aid in classroom training. This textbook consists of 14 chapters, with a total of 798 pages covering the major environments of SOLIDWORKS such as Sketching environment, Part modeling environment, Assembly environment, and Drawing environment. This textbook teaches users to use SOLIDWORKS mechanical design software for creating parametric 3D solid components, assemblies, and 2D drawings. This textbook also includes a chapter on creating multiple configurations of a design.This textbook not only focuses on the usage of the tools and commands of SOLIDWORKS but also on the concept of design. Every chapter in this textbook contains tutorials that provide users with step-by-step instructions for creating mechanical designs and drawings with ease. Moreover, every chapter ends with hands-on test drives which allow users to experience the user friendly and technical capabilities of SOLIDWORKS.Table of Contents:Chapter 1. Introduction to SOLIDWORKSChapter 2. Drawing Sketches with SOLIDWORKSChapter 3. Editing and Modifying SketchesChapter 4. Applying Geometric Relations and DimensionsChapter 5. Creating Base Feature of Solid ModelsChapter 6. Creating Reference GeometriesChapter 7. Advanced Modeling - IChapter 8. Advanced Modeling - IIChapter 9. Patterning and MirroringChapter 10. Advanced Modeling - IIIChapter 11. Working with ConfigurationsChapter 12. Working with Assemblies - IChapter 13. Working with Assemblies - IIChapter 14. Working with DrawingsMain Features of the Textbook:Comprehensive coverage of toolsStep-by-step real-world tutorials with every chapterHands-on test drives to enhance the skills at the end of every chapterAdditional notes and tipsCustomized content for faculty (PowerPoint Presentations)Free learning resources for faculty and studentsAdditional student and faculty projectsTechnical support for the book by contacting info@cadartifex.com