You've secured your systems, trained your users, and fortified your network. Think you're ready to handle a cybersecurity threat? Penetration testing is one of the best ways to see if your security will hold. It puts testers in the role of attackers, looking for vulnerabilities in your networks, computers, applications, email, and users. This course provides an introduction to the key knowledge and skills to start a program of professional penetration testing at your organization.

Cybersecurity expert Malcolm Shore reviews popular pen testing tools, as well as the Bash and Python scripting skills required to be able to acquire, modify, and re-use exploit code. He also provides a refresher on the Kali Linux penetration testing toolbox, approaches to web testing, and several important facets of exploit code. At the end of this course, you'll be prepared to take more advanced training and to pursue the popular Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) certification.

As the market and world change at a rapid speed, employee assessments are an essential tool for describing an employee's personality, motivation, and skill set which can easily transcend organizational results. In this course, HR and Organizational Development Professional Gabriella Parente-Neubert walks you through different types of assessments that are available and gives you the information to choose which will be most useful to you and your employees. Gabriella goes over common types of assessments, such as StrengthsFinder, Myers-Briggs, DiSC, and Emergenetics. Then she discusses additional types, including leadership assessments, team-building assessments, and more. Gabriella concludes with practical advice on implementing and evaluating an assessment and how to decide which tool is right for you.

In this course, strategic HR expert and author Don Phin explains what employee engagement is, what engaged work and leadership look like, and how to bring these qualities to your organization. Don shares tested and proven techniques for how to attract, hire, and retain engaged employees. He explains how to keep that engagement growing through feedback, compensation, and other methods so that your most valuable people remain at your company. He also explains how you can measure and evaluate your engagement efforts. Finally, Don shares advice on how to engage with remote workers and navigate a hybrid work environment, as well as software and apps that can help improve employee engagement.

The cloud provides a lot of great benefits for running your applications, but understanding and avoiding pitfalls will make the journey a lot more predictable and be more likely to provide the return on investment of time and energy put into the migration. In this course, Mike Benkovich takes you through the cloud journey, starting with how to build cloud-aware apps, to adding practices and processes to ensure you’re working in a way that can support the lifespan of your applications. Mike also shows how to use continuous delivery with GitHub Actions and DevOps pipelines, how to get started with Infrastructure as code, and discusses governance and policy. If you’re looking to move your applications to the cloud, join Mike in this course as he provides you with guardrails to make the journey successfully.

Pete Docter’s imagination is capable of some pretty incredible things. As a director at Pixar Animation Studios, Pete brought us Toy Story, Monsters Inc., and Up. These films make audiences wonder and dream. In this audio-only course, Justin Ahrens travels to California to sit down with Pete and learn about how these stories originate in his imagination and end up on the big screen. Learn about how the creative process starts early in life, how ideas are developed at Pixar, and why teamwork and great influences—from art to travel—are so important to creativity.

This course was created by Justin Ahrens. We are pleased to offer this training in our library.

With the free Photos for macOS software from Apple, you can manage, enhance, and share photos in a variety of ways. In this course, photographer, author, and educator Derrick Story takes you on a detailed exploration of Photos for macOS. Derrick starts with a quick-start introduction to taking pictures on your phone, then editing them with Photos and sharing them. He walks you through how to use the options available to you when you’re recording video. Derrick also covers several advanced iPhone camera techniques, such as switching among cameras, controlling the flash, working with ProRAW, and more. He covers each step of the process to edit pictures in Photos for macOS, then does the same for editing videos. Derrick offers some useful tips to enhance your experience using Photos, then concludes with resources to help you learn more.

Go one-on-one with world-renowned Photoshop expert Deke McClelland. The first of a three-part series, this course is your chance to master the fundamentals of Photoshop as you’ve never seen them before. It's everything you need to know, in the order you need to know it, complete with eye-popping imagery and practical advice. Best of all, it’s been completely updated for Photoshop 2020, the 30th anniversary edition of the program. Deke shows how to crop and straighten photographs, adjust brightness and contrast, correct color cast, and retouch portraits. You can also learn such skills as editing nondestructively with layers, making complex selections, developing photos in Camera Raw, and preparing photos for print. Come with questions, leave with answers—and a real sense of accomplishment.

Get started with Photoshop over your lunch break. In this course, Jesus Ramirez introduces you to how Photoshop works through a series of basic projects. Jesus starts with how to color correct photos in Photoshop. He shows you how to build layers, color correct with curves, use the eyedropper tools to get the exact colors you need, and then save and export your files. He describes how to change an object’s color in Photoshop, as well as the fine points to make the change look good. Jesus walks you through how to blur a background, including how to make the most of fills, filters, and masks. The next project is a social media graphic. Jesus shows you how to add layers, content, effects, and text to create your graphic.

Photographers and graphics designers—including professionals, hobbyists, enthusiasts, and students—use Photoshop to edit and refine their work. In this course, Deke McClelland takes you on a personalized tour of the basic tools and techniques you can use to make great images and graphics. Deke shows you how to open images from multiple sources, crop and straighten images, navigate panels and menus, and customize preferences. He guides you through how to edit images by adjusting brightness and contrast, correcting color, and retouching portraits. He demonstrates how to use layers to mask parts of an image and make composite artwork. He also covers formatting text, printing, preparing web graphics, and more.

Discover how to be the best Adobe Photoshop user you know. This comprehensive, project-based course is the second in a series of three courses by industry pro Deke McClelland. Deke doesn't just talk about the advanced features in Photoshop—he ties each concept to a clearly defined task, ensuring that you close out each chapter with a practical understanding of how things really work. Deke dives into the automated selection tools in Photoshop, as well as the Color Range, Focus Area, and Refine Edge commands. He covers such power features as Smart Objects, the Liquify filter, and the new Content-Aware Fill. Plus, you can learn how to use layer effects, Levels and Curves adjustments, Lens Correction and Perspective Warp, Smart Sharpen, and so much more.

This installment of Photoshop CC for Photographers goes beyond the basics and focuses on the features and techniques that will dramatically improve your photographs and maximize your efficiency. Photographer and teacher Chris Orwig first illustrates the strengths of Bridge, the Adobe Photoshop companion program, as an organizational tool and a device for batch processing photographs. He then moves on to mastering Photoshop, starting with layers—targeting, moving, and merging them with greater speed and efficiency. Then learn how to make better selections, refine their edges, and paint in adjustments, as well as increase the color accuracy of your images with Levels and Curves. Plus, learn to work with blending modes, apply creative color effects, and use the Burn and Dodge tools to improve contrast—a classic photographic technique updated for the digital age. Chris also covers correcting perspective and distortion, creating photo composites and panoramas, and working with DSLR video in Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop has many powerful features designed specifically for photographers interested in creating better photographs. Learn how to turn them to your advantage with these tutorials from teacher and photographer Chris Orwig. In this introductory course, Chris combines practical tips and creative insights, showing how to enhance and improve your photographs. The course also includes live-action interludes designed to help you think photographically, and shoot with the capabilities of Photoshop in mind.

Discover how to be the best Adobe Photoshop user you know. This comprehensive, project-based course is the second in a series of three courses by industry pro Deke McClelland. Deke doesn't just talk about the advanced features in Photoshop—he ties each concept to a clearly defined task, ensuring that you close out each chapter with a practical understanding of how things really work. Deke dives into the selection commands, including Color Range, Focus Area, Select > Subject, and Sky Replacement. He explains the best ways to refine your edges and layer masks. He covers such power features as transformations, smart objects, and image reconstruction. Plus, he delves into the intricacies of vector-based shapes, blend modes, layer effects, levels and curves, and so much more.

Go one-on-one with world-renowned Photoshop expert Deke McClelland in this comprehensive course. Part one of a three-part series, this is your chance to learn everything you need to know about Photoshop, in the order you need to know it, complete with real-world examples and practical advice. Deke begins by explaining the many ways to open files in Photoshop. He steps you through working with layers and masks. Photoshop has almost as many ways of saving files as it has of opening them, and Deke covers all of them. He walks you through luminance, brightness, contrast, and color balance. He shows you how to develop photographic images in Camera Raw. He discusses the ability in Photoshop to edit an entire image at once or adjust a specific, selected region—and he walks you through every selection tool in the software. There’s so much more, including an entire chapter on retouching! To conclude this part, Deke explains how to save images for use on the web and mobile devices.

Discover how to be the best Photoshop user you know with reigning expert Deke McClelland. In this final installment of his comprehensive three-part One-on-One series, Deke explains how Photoshop works at its highest level. Get around Photoshop more quickly by loading dozens of new and revised keyboard shortcuts. Experience the power of Smart Filters, dynamic effects, and such seemingly mundane (but secretly awesome) topics as blur and noise. Discover how to mask images with the Calculations command, and manipulate paths with the Pen tool. Learn how to assemble 360° panoramas and work with such exotic features as layer comps, artboards, and actions. Leave each chapter with a sense of real accomplishment that you can apply to your own marketable, eye-popping artwork.

Sometimes, you want to sit down and really learn the ins and outs of a program. Other times, that’s a luxury you don’t have time for. In this course, Jan Kabili runs through a slew of quick Photoshop tips, aimed at quickly solving common problems and tasks. Jan’s tips include how to remove a background in one-click, make a double exposure, enhance eyes in an image, quickly change the color of an icon, and many more. These workflow-changing tips and tricks are each just a few minutes long—so you can get answers fast and get back to work.

From powerful shortcuts to precise masking, this course can help you see Photoshop adjustment layers and blend modes in a whole new light. In this course, Rich Harrington unlocks some of the least-used options for his favorite features in Photoshop 2020. Learn how to use adjustment layers and blend modes to color correct and tone images, convert photos to black and white, add style, and fix exposure—all completely nondestructively. Rich also explores the hidden power of the "auto" options, lookup tables, gradient maps, and Smart Objects, and shows how to limit your adjustments when you want to achieve a subtler effect. By the time you finish the course, you'll have a more advanced understanding of adjustment layers and blend modes, and know how to make complex, nondestructive changes to any image.

Expand your thinking beyond Gaussian Blur. The new set of creative blurring tools in Photoshop CC 2014 allows you to take your photography and digital art to new heights. In this course, photographer and educator Chris Orwig shows how to use the filters in the Blur Gallery (including Field Blur, Iris Blur, Tilt-Shift, and more) in creative projects like these:

• Adding movement and energy to photos
• Creating illustrations
• Enhancing portraits
• Building a book cover with typography and blur
• Improving color
• Crafting an ethereal look

So grab your copy of Photoshop CC and get started taking your imagery to a new creative level.

PHP is one of the most prominent programming languages in the world, so it’s vital to keep your skills sharp and aligned with current demands. This course from Joe Casabona presents a number of challenges to help you reinforce your PHP knowledge. The challenges start off with simple, common problems like writing sorting functions, and increase in difficulty to more complex tasks like encrypting strings and namespacing. Most solutions can be found in less than 25 lines of code, and many of the videos can be watched on their own, so you don’t need to complete the previous challenges if there’s a specific knowledge set you want to test. Whether you’re just learning PHP or an experienced pro looking to stay sharp, this course will give you a good idea of where your PHP skills stand.

Learn how to paginate a list of items or database records using PHP. In this course, Kevin Skoglund reviews the fundamentals of pagination, a helpful design pattern for breaking down large data sets into smaller, more manageable sections. He provides use cases and shows how to write the actual PHP code to find records and display a certain number per page. He then shows how to paginate records from a SQL database, add links to pages, and use object-oriented programming to define pagination functions inside a single class and create links between pages. Each chapter contains practical, hands-on programming lessons that will help you build your PHP skills.