Explore Flask¶

Explore Flask is a book about best practices and patterns for developing web applications with Flask. The book was funded by 426 backers on Kickstarter in July 2013.

I finally released the book, after spending almost a year working on it. Almost immediately I was tired of managing distribution and limiting the book’s audience by putting it behind a paywall. I didn’t write a book to run a business, I wrote it to put some helpful content out there and help grow the Flask community.

In June of 2014, soon after finishing the book, I reformatted it for the web and released it here for free. No payment or donation or anything required. Just enjoy!

About the author¶ My name is Robert Picard. I’m a security consultant and a Flask enthusiast. I like Flask for its simplicity in the face of frameworks like Django that try and be everything to everyone. That model works for a lot of people, but not for me. If you want to get in touch, feel free to send me an email at robert@robert.io or connect on twitter @__rlp. If you have feedback on the book, check out the GitHub repository too.

Thank you¶ First of all, I’d like to say thank you to my volunteer editor, Will Kahn-Greene. He was great about going over my very rough drafts and helping me decide on the scope and direction of the content. I’m looking forward to working with him to manage the project into the future. Another big thanks to everyone who took the time to talk with me about how they are using Flask. This includes Armin Ronacher (Flask creator), Mark Harviston (Elsevier), Glenn Yonemitsu (Markup Hive), Andy Parsons (Happify), Oleg Lavrovsky (Apps with love), Joel Anderson (Cloudmancer) and Mahmoud Abdelkader (Balanced). The cover and all the illustrations in this book were done by Dominic Flask. Explore Flask wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for the hundreds of people who backed the project on Kickstarter. A big thanks to a particularly generous sponsor, Balanced Payments: As promised in the Kickstarter project, here are the names of all of the generous men and women who pledged $50 or more: CodeLesson, Sam Black, Michał Bartoszkiewicz, Chad Catlett, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, John Schrom, Zach White, Dorothy L. Erwin, Brandon Brown, Fredrik Larsson, Karsten Hoffrath (khoffrath), Jonathan Chen, Mitch Wainer, John Cleaver, Paul Baines, Brandon Bennett, Gaelan Adams, Nick Charlton, Dustin Chapman and Senko Rašić.

License¶ In the spirit of open source software, I’m placing all of the content in this book in the public domain. Have fun with it.