You probably noticed that lately I haven't been blogging as frequently as I used to. Today I'm letting you in on my little secret:

I wish I could share the actual cover of the book featuring a cool animal, but for now the front page will have to do since the cover hasn't been designed yet.

So now you know. I'm writing a book on Flask. But what does that mean? How will the book be different from the Mega-Tutorial series?

When I wrote the first Mega-Tutorial article I didn't know how many articles the entire series would have, nor the specific topics I was going to cover. I just went with the flow and wrote about what I found interesting at the time. It was a learning experience for me.

Writing a book is much more difficult. I have to make sure that there is consistency (both in technical content and writing style) between all the chapters. It's like writing a single very long article that is published all at once and that must be as polished as possible from the start, since making corrections after publication, while possible, is a more complicated process than editing a blog post.

I expect there will be some similarities between the Mega-Tutorial and the book. The book will feature a web application, but it will not be microblog. The structure of the new application will be better than that of microblog, which grew organically as I developed it. I will make this new application available online as a demonstration at some point in the future. This is, of course, a dirty strategy. I will be showing you the eye candy to tempt you to go get the book!

Some of the topics I covered in the tutorial will also appear in the book, but there are a number of topics I did not feature in the series that will receive attention in the book. I haven't determined what the final structure of the book is yet, but I know the following topics are among those that will be covered in detail:

Databases

User authentication

Ajax and RESTful APIs

Administration pages

Hosting

I'm also interested in having some information on Web Sockets in the book, but haven't found a way to fit it with the rest yet. If it ends up not making the cut this will be material that will appear here in my blog.

I'm sure you now want to know when the book will be available. Since I'm working with a publishing house the schedule is not entirely up to me. I still have a lot of writing to do, but assuming things go as I have planned the book should be available both in print and as en e-book in Q1 of 2014. I believe the folks at O'Reilly Media are likely to make an early release available online for people to review and provide feedback, so I'll let you know when and if that happens.

If you want to stay informed about the developments around this book I invite you to visit http://flaskbook.com, the book's official website. There isn't much right now, but you can subscribe to receive notifications (this site is owned and operated by myself).

Alternatively you can connect with me in the usual ways:

These are exciting times for the Flask community. If the rumors I'm hearing are correct I expect in the following months you will have not one but several books to choose from!

Miguel