What this book covers

Chapter 1, Creating Your First Flask Application, begins with the bold declaration, "Flask is fun", which is one of the first things that you see when you view the official Flask documentation, and in this chapter, you will get to grips with why so many Python developers agree.

Chapter 2, Relational Databases with SQLAlchemy, says that relational databases are the bedrock upon which almost all modern web applications are built. We will use SQLAlchemy, a powerful object-relational mapper that allows us to abstract away the complexities of multiple database engines. In this chapter, you will learn about how the data model that you choose early on will affect almost every facet of the code that follows.

Chapter 3, Templates and Views, covers two of the most recognizable components of the framework: the Jinja2 template language, and the URL routing framework. We will fully immerse ourselves in Flask and see our app finally start to take shape. As we progress through the chapter, our app will start looking like a proper website.

Chapter 4, Forms and Validation, shows you how to use forms to modify content on your blog directly through the site handled by the popular WTForms library. This is a fun chapter because we will add all sorts of new ways to interact with our site. We will create forms to work with our data models and learn how to receive and validate user data.

Chapter 5, Authenticating Users, explains how you can add user authentication to your site. Being able to distinguish one user from another allows us to develop an entirely new class of features. For instance, we will see how to restrict access to the create, edit, and delete views, preventing anonymous users from tampering with site content. We can also display a user's draft posts to them but hide them from everyone else.

Chapter 6, Building an Administrative Dashboard, shows you how you can build an administrative dashboard for your site, using the excellent Flask-Admin. Our admin dashboard will give certain selected users the ability to manage all the content across the entire site. In essence, the admin site will be a graphical frontend for the database, supporting operations to create, edit, and delete rows in our application's tables.

Chapter 7, AJAX and RESTful APIs, uses Flask-Restless to create a RESTful API for the blogging app. A RESTful API is a powerful way of accessing your app programmatically by providing highly-structured data to represent it. Flask-Restless works very well with our SQLAlchemy models, and it also handles complex tasks, such as serialization, and result filtering.

Chapter 8, Testing Flask Apps, covers how you can write unit tests covering all parts of the blogging app. We will utilize Flask's test client to simulate "live" requests. We will also see how the Mock library can simplify testing complex interactions, such as calling third-party services, such as databases.

Chapter 9, Excellent Extensions, teaches you how to enhance your Flask installation with popular third-party extensions. We used extensions throughout the book, but we can now explore the added extra security or functionality with very little effort and can polish off your app nicely.

Chapter 10, Deploying Your Application, teaches you how to deploy your Flask applications securely and in an automated, repeatable manner. We will look at how to configure the commonly-used WSGI capable servers, such as Apache and Nginx, as well as the Python web server Gunicorn, to give you plenty of options. Then, we will see how to secure part or the entire site using SSL before finally wrapping up our application in a configuration management tool to automate our deployment.