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Preview of "Explore Flask" Book

44 points by n3bu 13y ago

kbar13 13y ago
I'm planning on getting it for free, and if it's useful, probably drop like 5-10 dollars on it. Looking forward to reading!
- justinsteele 13y ago
  I did $4 up front, justified in my mind for "effort", and then I'll be doing the same as you (giving after if it's useful).
- rpicard 13y ago
  That's exactly what I'm hoping for. If you don't find it useful it would be amazing of you to contribute some feedback, even if it's just letting me know how you felt.
  - jdotjdot 13y ago
    That is exactly my plan as well. Glad there's finally a book out there on Flask. Without having seen it yet, one thing I'd love to see is "Flask for recovering Djangonauts" or something similar, in addition to how to use Flask at scale. Basically, best practices, advice, and some good libraries for someone who doesn't want ALL the batteries included in their framework, but also would prefer some more reliability than randomly slapping some libraries together and hoping for the best. The intimidation of not having true official integration for a lot of Flask plug-ins is what has kept me from doing anything at scale with Flask so far, recognizing that this is not necessarily a valid concern.
    - rpicard 13y ago
      I wonder if "Flask for recovering Djangonauts" would make for a good blog post / tutorial. It might even be enough material for a video course. Best practices, advice, and good libraries are what I'm shooting for with Explore Flask, so hopefully that will come across. As far as official library integration goes, I wouldn't worry about it too much. There are several standard extensions that people use (e.g. Flask-WTF, Flask-Bcrypt, Flask-SQLAlchemy) and as long as you stick with them you'll be alright. They're usually just wrappers around major Python libraries (WTForms, Bcrypt, SQLAlchemy) so the source is easy enough to check out.
    - caseydurfee 13y ago
      That's a good idea. I think a lot of people have that trepidation about switching to flask. Just a quick "instead of this in django, use this in flask" section would go a long way. I think there's a great book to be written about scaling codebases that started out as monolithic MVC frameworks (Django, Rails, Struts, etc.) I find Flask's design is heavily informed by the problems that monolithic frameworks create, so it would be a great case study, but it's totally out of scope for an intro to flask, though.
rpicard 13y ago
Thanks for posting this! I'm the author if anyone has any questions. If you have some feedback, I'm looking forward to seeing bug reports on GitHub: https://github.com/rpicard/explore-flask https://github.com/rpicard/explore-flask
aezell 13y ago
I love this. I think it would be useful to move the debugging chapter much earlier in the book. Presumably, new users of Flask will encounter the (pretty awesome) Werkzeug error page as they move through the book. It might work well if a debugging chapter had exposed them to a little bit of how to interpret and use that tool. I'm sure there's a lot more about debugging to cover so maybe splitting things up makes sense too.
- rpicard 13y ago
  I hadn't thought of that, but it does make sense. I've added in issue to the repo: https://github.com/rpicard/explore-flask/issues/16 https://github.com/rpicard/explore-flask/issues/16
  - aezell 13y ago
    Great. I bought a copy and will be following along on your progress. I'll be sure to use issues and pull requests for any other suggestions/fixes I might stumble across.
HNJohnC 13y ago
Perhaps a link somewhere to what this 'flask' thing actually is on either your repo or the page you linked to would be appreciated by people like myself who have no clue what you're writing a book about in the first place?
- rpicard 13y ago
  That's actually why I hadn't posted this already, but now that the traffic is rolling in, I'm not complaining! For the record, here it is: http://flask.pocoo.org/ http://flask.pocoo.org/
BerislavLopac 13y ago
Any plans for other formats besides PDF?
- rpicard 13y ago
  The plan right now is to use PDF for the pre-release versions and start building for other formats on 1.0. I've considered doing an HTML version, but I haven't put a ton of thought into it.

44 points by n3bu 13y ago

I'm planning on getting it for free, and if it's useful, probably drop like 5-10 dollars on it. Looking forward to reading!

justinsteele 13y ago
I did $4 up front, justified in my mind for "effort", and then I'll be doing the same as you (giving after if it's useful).
rpicard 13y ago
That's exactly what I'm hoping for. If you don't find it useful it would be amazing of you to contribute some feedback, even if it's just letting me know how you felt.
- jdotjdot 13y ago
  That is exactly my plan as well. Glad there's finally a book out there on Flask. Without having seen it yet, one thing I'd love to see is "Flask for recovering Djangonauts" or something similar, in addition to how to use Flask at scale. Basically, best practices, advice, and some good libraries for someone who doesn't want ALL the batteries included in their framework, but also would prefer some more reliability than randomly slapping some libraries together and hoping for the best. The intimidation of not having true official integration for a lot of Flask plug-ins is what has kept me from doing anything at scale with Flask so far, recognizing that this is not necessarily a valid concern.
  - rpicard 13y ago
    I wonder if "Flask for recovering Djangonauts" would make for a good blog post / tutorial. It might even be enough material for a video course. Best practices, advice, and good libraries are what I'm shooting for with Explore Flask, so hopefully that will come across. As far as official library integration goes, I wouldn't worry about it too much. There are several standard extensions that people use (e.g. Flask-WTF, Flask-Bcrypt, Flask-SQLAlchemy) and as long as you stick with them you'll be alright. They're usually just wrappers around major Python libraries (WTForms, Bcrypt, SQLAlchemy) so the source is easy enough to check out.
  - caseydurfee 13y ago
    That's a good idea. I think a lot of people have that trepidation about switching to flask. Just a quick "instead of this in django, use this in flask" section would go a long way. I think there's a great book to be written about scaling codebases that started out as monolithic MVC frameworks (Django, Rails, Struts, etc.) I find Flask's design is heavily informed by the problems that monolithic frameworks create, so it would be a great case study, but it's totally out of scope for an intro to flask, though.

rpicard 13y ago

Thanks for posting this! I'm the author if anyone has any questions. If you have some feedback, I'm looking forward to seeing bug reports on GitHub: https://github.com/rpicard/explore-flask https://github.com/rpicard/explore-flask

aezell 13y ago

I love this. I think it would be useful to move the debugging chapter much earlier in the book. Presumably, new users of Flask will encounter the (pretty awesome) Werkzeug error page as they move through the book. It might work well if a debugging chapter had exposed them to a little bit of how to interpret and use that tool. I'm sure there's a lot more about debugging to cover so maybe splitting things up makes sense too.

rpicard 13y ago
I hadn't thought of that, but it does make sense. I've added in issue to the repo: https://github.com/rpicard/explore-flask/issues/16 https://github.com/rpicard/explore-flask/issues/16
- aezell 13y ago
  Great. I bought a copy and will be following along on your progress. I'll be sure to use issues and pull requests for any other suggestions/fixes I might stumble across.

HNJohnC 13y ago

Perhaps a link somewhere to what this 'flask' thing actually is on either your repo or the page you linked to would be appreciated by people like myself who have no clue what you're writing a book about in the first place?

rpicard 13y ago
That's actually why I hadn't posted this already, but now that the traffic is rolling in, I'm not complaining! For the record, here it is: http://flask.pocoo.org/ http://flask.pocoo.org/

BerislavLopac 13y ago

Any plans for other formats besides PDF?

rpicard 13y ago
The plan right now is to use PDF for the pre-release versions and start building for other formats on 1.0. I've considered doing an HTML version, but I haven't put a ton of thought into it.