Whether you’re a photographer, scrapbooker, or aspiring graphic artist, Photoshop Elements 12 is an ideal image-editing tool—once you know how to use it. This bestselling book removes the guesswork. With candid, jargon-free advice and step-by-step guidance, you’ll get the most out of Elements for everything from...

How do you take your data analysis skills beyond Excel to the next level? By learning just enough Python to get stuff done. This hands-on guide shows non-programmers like you how to process information that’s initially too messy or difficult to access. You don't need to know a thing about the Python programming language to...

Learn how to take full advantage of Apache Kafka, the distributed, publish-subscribe queue for handling real-time data feeds. With this comprehensive book, you’ll understand how Kafka works and how it’s designed. Authors Neha Narkhede, Gwen Shapira, and Todd Palino show you how to deploy production Kafka clusters; secure,...

Manage your organization’s naming architecture effectively, from the administrative/policy side right through to the technical DNS and nameserver implementations. This practical book takes you through the basics—the anatomies of domain names and DNS requests—and covers DNS and domain issues from a variety of...

Currently used at many colleges, universities, and high schools, this hands-on introduction to computer science is ideal for people with little or no programming experience. The goal of this concise book is not just to teach you Java, but to help you think like a computer scientist. You’ll learn how to program—a useful...

Whether you’re sharing data between two internal systems or building an API so that users can access their data, this practical guide has everything you need to build APIs with PHP. Author Lorna Jane Mitchell provides lots of hands-on code samples, real-world examples, and advice based on her extensive experience to guide you...

You’ll quickly find answers to the annoying questions that...

How can you design technology that becomes a part of a user’s life and not a distraction from it? This practical book explores the concept of calm technology, a method for smoothly capturing a user’s attention only when necessary, while calmly remaining in the background most of the time. You’ll learn how to design...

Add life and depth to your web applications and improve user experience through the discrete use of CSS transitions and animations. With this concise guide, you’ll learn how to make page elements move or change in appearance, whether you want to realistically bounce a ball, gradually expand a drop-down menu, or simply bring...

Microsoft Azure has over 20 platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings that can act in support of a big data analytics solution. So which one is right for your project? This practical book helps you understand the breadth of Azure services by organizing them into a reference framework you can use when crafting your own big data analytics...

If you’re a data scientist who struggles to navigate the murky space...