To get the most out of this book

To fully grasp the initial chapters of the book, you should have a background in Python web and API programming using any framework or a little background in Flask. But having a background in creating scripts using standard Python can also help you at least understand the first chapter, which is a jumpstart on how to use the Python language to build a web application using basic Flask concepts. Experienced developers can use the book to enrich their Flask experience further with the new utility classes and functions of the Flask 3.x framework.

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
Python 3.11.x	Windows 10, at least
React 18.3.1	Ubuntu (using PowerShell and WSL2)
Flutter 3.19.5
PostgreSQL 13.4
MongoDB Community Server 7.0.11
Redis server 7.2.3 (Ubuntu)
Redis server 3.0.504 (Windows)
HBase/Hadoop 2.5.5
Couchbase 7.2.0
Cassandra 4.1.5
Neo4J Desktop 1.5.8
Julia 1.9.2
Docker 25.0.3
Kubernetes 5.0.4 (Docker-bundled)
Zeebe 1.1.0 (Docker)
Airflow 2.5
Temporal.io server 1.22.0
Apache HTTP Server 2.4
Jaeger 1.5
VS Code 1.88.0

Optionally, it would help if you use a licensed Microsoft Excel to open XLSX and CSV files for Chapter 6 and Foxit PDF Reader for the generated PDF files.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

We advise you to install the specified Python version to avoid unexpected errors related to version incompatibilities. Also, it will be advisable to download and read the code from GitHub while reading the chapters to understand the discussions. The code in GitHub is just a prototype and may serve as a guide to build your versions of the applications.