5 of the best Laravel books

Laravel – Up and Running: A Framework for Building Modern PHP Apps Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Matt Stauffer

What sets Laravel apart from other PHP web frameworks?

Speed and simplicity, for starters. This rapid application development framework and its vast ecosystem of tools let you quickly build new sites and applications with clean, readable code. With this practical guide, Matt Stauffer-a leading teacher and developer in the Laravel community-provides the definitive introduction to one of today’s most popular web frameworks. The book’s high-level overview and concrete examples will help experienced PHP web developers get started with Laravel right away. By the time you reach the last page, you should feel comfortable writing an entire application in Laravel from scratch.

Dive into several features of this framework, including: Blade, Laravel’s powerful, custom templating tool Tools for gathering, validating, normalizing, and filtering user-provided data Laravel’s Eloquent ORM for working with the application’s databases The Illuminate request object, and its role in the application lifecycle PHPUnit, Mockery, and PHPSpec for testing your PHP code Laravel’s tools for writing JSON and RESTful APIs Interfaces for file system access, sessions, cookies, caches, and search Tools for implementing queues, jobs, events, and WebSocket event publishing Laravel’s specialty packages: Scout, Passport, Cashier, Echo, Elixir, Valet, and Socialite

Laravel 5.1 Beauty: Creating Beautiful Web Apps in Laravel 5.1 Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Chuck Heintzelman

Leverage the power of Laravel 5.1 to create a simple, clean and beautiful blogging application and the administration area required to maintain the blog. This book goes through the process of designing, creating, and coding a real-world application using Laravel. You’ll learn about: * Installing Laravel 5.1 * Using Homestead * Using Elixir * Database Migrations and Seeding * Form Requests * Views (Blade templates) * Authentication * And much, much more!

Build APIs You Won’t Hate: Everyone and their dog wants an API, so you should probably learn how to build them Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Phil Sturgeon (Author), Laura Bohill (Designer)

API development is becoming increasingly common for server-side developers thanks to the rise of front-end JavaScript frameworks, iPhone applications, and API-centric architectures. It might seem like grabbing stuff from a data source and shoving it out as JSON would be easy, but surviving changes in business logic, database schema updates, new features, or deprecated endpoints can be a nightmare.

After finding many of the existing resources for API development to be lacking, Phil learned a lot of things the hard way through years of trial and error. This book aims to condense that experience, taking examples and explanations further than the trivial apples and pears nonsense tutorials often provide.

By passing on some best practices and general good advice you can hit the ground running with API development, combined with some horror stories and how they were overcome/avoided/averted. This book will discuss the theory of designing and building APIs in any language or framework, with this theory applied in PHP-based examples.

Learning Laravel’s Eloquent Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Francesco Malatesta

Learning Laravel’s Eloquent starts off by taking you through setting up your first project and guiding you in creating a perfect Laravel environment. You will learn how to build the right database structure with the Migrations system and the Schema Builder class. Next, you will be introduced to the main element of Eloquent: the model. After treating the model as a single, isolated entity, you will learn how to create relations between them. You will be taken through organizing, filtering, and sorting your data with collections. You will then learn to enhance an application with new features using events and by creating new observers. Towards the end of the book, you will discover how to install, configure, and use the Eloquent ORM without Laravel. The book concludes by walking you through how to deal with complex problems and build advanced and flexible systems.

Design Patterns in PHP and Laravel Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Kelt Dockins

Learn each of the original gang of four design patterns, and how they are relevant to modern PHP and Laravel development. Written by a working developer who uses these patterns every day, you will easily be able to implement each pattern into your workflow and improve your development. Each pattern is covered with full examples of how it can be used.

Too often design patterns are explained using tricky concepts, when in fact they are easy to use and can enrich your everyday development. Design Patterns in PHP and Laravel aims to break down tricky concepts into humorous and easy-to-recall details, so that you can begin using design patterns easily in your everyday work with PHP and Laravel.

This book teaches you design patterns in PHP and Laravel using real-world examples and plenty of humor.