Running a simple game using Pygame

In this article by Ivan Idris, author of Instant Pygame for Python Game Development How-to , we will create a simple game. As is traditional in the world of programming, we will start with a Hello World! example. It's not a game per se. It's important to notice the so-called main game loop where all the action happens and the usage of the Font module to render text. In this program we will manipulate a Pygame's Surface object, that is used for drawing and we will handle a quit event.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Quick start – Firebug window overview and inspecting

Firebug is not about fixing the bugs and tweaking CSS (cascade style sheet), it consists of many tools that can be of great help to a web developer and designer. Firebug is similar golf club bag. Each club (panel) in Firebug is a powerful weapon for web developers. Like a golf player, a web developer has to choose a club (panel) for different situations.

In this article by Chandan Luthra, the author of Instant Firebug Starter, we will learn

• Console panel

• HTML panel

• CSS panel

• Script panel

• DOM panel

• Net panel

• Cookies panel

Collaborative Work with SVN and Git

Collaborative work is an important topic at present. Many large projects are now being developed in a collaborative way. But this was not always easy for the developer. When many developers are working together on large projects, each developer must have a well-known area of work, and each developer must make sure that he doesn't interfere with the work of the other developers.

Without tools such as SVN or Git, large projects like jQuery or Linux Mint could not be possible. The developers of all these projects are distributed all over the world and they often work in different time zones and have different ways of working, but in the end all the parts are merged into one great project in SVN or Git.

So, SVN and Git are a great enrichment for all developers and essential for the fast progress of large web projects.

In this article by Thomas Deuling the author of Aptana Studio Beginner's Guide, we will take a look at how easy it is to work with SVN and Git in Aptana Studio.

Accessing Oracle

In this article by Geoffrey Hudik, the author of Instant Oracle Database and PowerShell How-to , we will look at loading libraries to create objects to interact with Oracle.

Common design patterns and how to prototype them

In this article by Amit Daliot, the author of Instant Axure RP Starter [Instant], we will learn how to prototype some commonly used UI design patterns using the key features of Axure. Axure prototyping enables you to create accurate, high fidelity mockups of applications and web services quickly and with no coding skills. By the end of this article, you will be able to work more efficiently with Axure and will be able to deliver detailed designs much faster.

Getting Started with Impressive Presentations

Presentations are one of the most effective ways of communicating our ideas to people who are interested in the topic. We used to create presentations with popular desktop programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint and Open Office Impress. Things have changed dramatically now and web-based presentations are gaining more interest from users. impress.js is one of the stand out frameworks among the web-based presentation creation libraries and tools.

In this article by Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake, the author of Building Impressive Presentations with impress. js, we are going to work on creating impressive visualizations with the impress.js framework.

In this article, we are going to cover the following topics:

• What is impress.js?
• Built-in features
• Beyond presentations with impress.js
• Why is it important?
• Downloading and configuring impress.js

Let's Chat

Beginning with Yahoo! Chat in the early 2000 and up to today's popular Google Talk or Facebook Chat, chatting has been the most popular form of real-time communication on the Internet.

This article by Rohit Rai, author of Socket.IO Real-time Web Application Development will show you how to build a chat room using node and express, and the socket.io library.

Implementation of SASS

In this article by Alex Libby, author of SASS CSS How-to, we will cover the details of downloading and installing SASS as well as how SASS can be viewed in a browser.

Creating an Animated Gauge with CSS3

In web application development, gauges can be useful for showing complicated or dynamic data in a visual or intuitive way. In this article by Sandro Paganotti, author of  Designing Next Generation Web Projects with CSS3, we'll learn how to create a fully customizable animated gauge that can respond to real-time changes. We'll also discuss techniques to port this type of widget for support in older web browsers. We'll start by learning about a cool SASS enhancement called Compass; this is another way to deal with CSS3 experimental prefixes. The following is the list of the topics we'll discuss:

• A basic gauge structure

• Using Compass

• Using rem

• Moving the arrow

• Animating the arrow

• Dealing with older browsers

Parallel Dimensions – Branching with Git

Cheap branching and merging are the two most well known and applauded features of Git. In this article by Ravishankar Somasundaram, author of Git: Version Control for Everyone Beginner's Guide, we shall see what branching is, why you need a branch, and when you need a branch. Also we shall see how to merge branches when needed.

All these are explored from an organization's point of view. We will also learn and practice methods to simplify our work by:

• Creating simple alias for frequently used lengthy commands

• Chaining of multiple commands for frequently used workflows

Remotely Preview and test mobile web pages on actual devices with Adobe Edge Inspect

Mobile web testing is currently a really time consuming and cumbersome process as there are no direct debugging tools available with mobile web browsers. Since mobile devices vary so much it is important to ensure that your web page looks as intended across the multiple mobile devices that you are targeting for your audience. Adobe Edge Inspect is a perfect tool for frontend web developers and designers who are developing for mobile devices, allowing them to simultaneously test on numerous devices in real time as they develop without learning anything new.

With Adobe Edge Inspect you can pair multiple mobile devices with your computer and browse in Google Chrome on your computer and all the paired mobile devices stay in sync. This means that any page you open in Chrome either from your local HTTP web server (via localhost) or a production server, that same page is opened synchronously in all the paired mobile devices. After that you can target any mobile device for inspection and start remote testing, make changes to the HTML markup, CSS style rules, and JavaScript, and instantly see the changes in the targeted mobile devices.

In this article by Joseph Khan, author of Instant Adobe Edge Inspect Starter, we will talk on the most important feature of Adobe Edge Inspect, that is, how we can remotely preview, inspect, and debug a mobile web page. So let's get started.

Inter-process Communication

In this article by Mark Nelson and Tanya Williams, the authors of Oracle BPM Suite 11g: Advanced BPMN Topics , you will learn to convert a video into any of the formats needed for HTML5 Video playback.

Inter-process Communication introduces us to the theory of how processes can communicate with each other and with other components. A number of topics are covered such as: conversations—what they are, and the default conversation.

Welcome to our exploration of some of the advanced topics in BPMN. When we set out to write this book, we chose the areas where we see the most confusion and difficulty in understanding how to use BPMN. We will present theory and also build practical exercises together so that you can see how the theory is applied. Let's start our journey by building an understanding of inter-process communication.

Extending Your Structure and Search

Till now we've learned how to install, configure, and query our ElasticSearch cluster. We also prepared some more sophisticated mappings. We've also used aliasing to make querying easier and in addition to that we used routing to control where the data is placed. In this article by Rafal Kuc and Marek Rogozinski, authors of ElasticSearch Server, we will extend our knowledge of ElasticSearch by looking at how to index data that is not flat, how to handle geographical data, and how to deal with files. We will also learn how to distinguish the text fragment that was matched and how to implement commonly used autocomplete features. By the end of this article you will learn:

• How to index data that is not flat

• How to extend your index with additional data such as time-to-live and document identifier

• How to handle highlighting

• How to implement the autocomplete feature

• How to handle files

• How to handle geographical data

Getting started with using Chef

Now that you have a functioning Chef Server running and the tools needed to interact with it, we will discuss the steps involved in setting up nodes that talk to the Chef service and will use the information provided to install software and set up the server.

This article by John Ewart, author of Instant Chef Starter will take you through the process of using Chef to provision a new Ubuntu 12.10 server and set it up as a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) server as this is a very simple and quite common server configuration at the moment. The basic steps will be as follows:

1. Setting up the server.

2. Downloading and examining cookbooks.

3. Uploading cookbooks into your Chef Server.

4. Creating and assigning roles to the node.

5. Completing the process by applying changes to the node.

YUI Test

This article will help you to learn what YUI Test is and how to use this JavaScript unit testing framework for testing JavaScript code. In this article by Hazem Saleh, author of JavaScript Unit Testing ,we will cover the following topics:

• Basics of YUI Test framework

• Writing your first YUI test

Planning for a successful integration

This article by Gary P. Gauvin, author of Instant Team Foundation Server 2012 and Project Sever 2010 Integration How-to helps us examine what's needed to ensure that that your integration is successful. It covers the prerequisites and the planning needed to begin, scenarios for various environments, and a few tips to set you up for success. Planning is the most important part in a successful integration of the two servers so that there are no undue errors during the integration process. The article gives a very systematic step-by-step approach for planning and getting all set for integration which is not difficult to understand.

We will examine what's needed to ensure that your integration is successful. We'll cover the prerequisites and the planning needed to begin, the scenarios for test or production environments, and the different types of synchronization that are possible.

Modules

Every framework has a set of features that differentiates it from the other frameworks out there. In this article by Dan Menard, the author of Instant AngularJS Starter, we will discover the strengths of AngularJS by exploring one of its most prominent features—Modules.

Working with Apps in Splunk

In this article by Vincent Bumgarner, author of Implementing Splunk: Big Data Reporting and Development for Operational Intelligence , we will explore what makes up a Splunk app. We will:

• Inspect included apps

• Install apps from Splunkbase

• Build our own app

• Customize app navigation

• Customize app look and feel

OSGi life cycle

OSGi is a tried and true modularity standard for Java. It has in recent years gained a lot of traction and tooling; becoming frequently used in Enterprise containers and distributed software systems

In this article by Jamie Goodyear and Johan Edstrom the authors of Instant OSGi Starter [Instant] , we'll explore the various states involved in an OSGi life cycle.

Getting Started with GeoServer

GeoServer can be installed on many different operating systems, since it's a Java application. You can run it on any kind of operating system for which exists a Java virtual machine. It takes advantage of multi-threaded operations, and supports 64-bit modern operating systems.

This article by Stefano Iacovelle and Brian Youngblood, authors of GeoServer Beginner's Guide, will cover, in detail, the steps that will bring you to a successful installation. Though we will explain the whole process in detail, don't be afraid. As soon as you finish reading it, you will have your running copy of GeoServer. The steps will be illustrated in two scenarios, an Ubuntu 12.04 machine and a Windows 7 machine. We chose these two as they cover the majority of users. Besides Ubuntu being a Debian derivative, the installation process can be easily reproduced on other similar distributions, for example, Debian or Linux Mint.

Creating Virtual Landscapes

Tools are everything in game development today. Modern three-dimensional games are several orders of magnitude more complex than Sandy White's 1983 Ant Attack on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. To create lush visuals expected from current games, we rely on a host of tools to generate content at different stages of production. Quite often, terrain is the canvas on which content is painted, if you think about it, while you might play a game and think how great the scenery looks, you're not necessarily looking at the terrain but rather the textures, vegetation, buildings and everything else that artist has constructed around it. Before we dive into using GROME we're going to cover some common caveats that apply to most game engines.

In this article by Richard A. Hawley, author of Grome Terrain Modeling with Ogre3D, UDK, and Unity3D, we're going to look at:

• Describing a world in data

• Texture sizes

• Game world scales

• Starting a new GROME project

Miscellaneous Gameplay Features

Torque 3D is a complete game engine. It supports graphics, sound, user input, networking, and gameplay. Gameplay are the rules for your game that make it unique. These are the challenges the player must overcome.

In this article by David Wyand, the author of Torque 3D Game Development Cookbook we will be looking at various parts of Torque 3D that help you expand on the gameplay rules that are already available, and help you build your own.

Constructing and Evaluating Your Design Solution

In this article by Andy Kirk the author of Data Visualization: a successful design process , we look at the broad variety of options for building our solution and the remaining important tasks to undertake before launching.

We will run through a selection of the most common and useful software applications and programming environments to help you select the most appropriate tool to match your design requirements and technical capabilities.

We will look at some of the key considerations around testing, finishing, and launching a design solution as well as the important matter of evaluating the success of your project post-launch.

Finally, we wrap things up with a discussion about the best ways for you to continue to learn, develop, and refine your data visualization design skills as you seek to master this fascinating and rewarding discipline.

Core .NET Recipes

This article by A.P. Rajshekhar, author of .Net Framework 4.5 Expert Programming Cookbook , will cover recipes related to core concepts in .NET, which will include the following:

• Metadata-driven programming: The first six recipes will cover how to use attributes as metadata for specific purposes such as validation and localization.

• Reflection: The Processing custom attributes via reflection recipe will tell you how to use reflection to create metadata processors such as applications or libraries that can understand custom attributes and provide the output based on them.

• Asynchronous file I/O: This is a new feature for file input/output introduced in .NET 4.5. The Using asynchronous file I/O for directory-to-directory copy recipe will cover this feature.

• Dynamic programming: .NET 4.0 introduced the concept of dynamic programming, in which blocks of code marked as dynamic will be executed directly, bypassing the compilation phase. We will look at this in the last recipe, Accessing JSON using dynamic programming.

BackTrack Forensics

Computer forensics involves using various means to analyze, report, and recover information from computers or digital storage media, generally for legal purposes. The outcome in general is to provide the information gathered in such a way that it is useful for the person requesting the information. This includes the recovery of passwords, analyzing computer break-ins or attempts, recovering data from a hard drive after it's been "erased", and so on. In the article by Willie Pritchett and David De Smet authors of BackTrack 5 Cookbook we will examine how BackTrack can be utilized for forensic purposes.

In this article, we will cover:

• Intrusion detection and log analysis

• Recursive directory encryption/decryption

• Scanning for signs of rootkits

• Recovering data from a problematic source

• Retrieving a Windows password

• Resetting a Windows password

• Looking at the Windows registry entries