Chapter 1 - This book’s purpose

This book will take you on a journey through Laravel. Hopefully, you’ll go places you’ve never been and see you things you’ve never seen. It’s a travelogue of sorts. We’ll have a definite destination (the application we’re creating) and I’ll point out some amazing sights along the way. When you reach the end, drop me a note at chuckh@gmail.com. I’m very interested in what you thought of the journey.

This book is meant to be experienced. To be used. Please follow along and build the application chapter by chapter. Each chapter leads to the next. The sections within a chapter flow forward. Each part of the book builds on the previous.

You could think of the sections in each chapter as cities. Then the chapters themselves are countries, and the book’s parts are continents and … Okay, enough with the labored traveling analogy.

The focus throughout the book is the step-by-step creation of an application using Laravel 4.

This is not a typical technical manual I’ve attempted to mimic the actual process of design and development as closely as possible. This means there are false starts, design changes, and refactoring along the way. You’ve been warned <grin>.

What’s not in this book

• Every aspect of Laravel. This is not a reference book on the entire framework.
• Caching, Events, or Logging. These are important topics, but the application we’re creating doesn’t require them.
• Queues, Authentication, Cookies, or Sessions. Again, important stuff, but we don’t need it.
• Database. Yeah, it almost pains me to admit this. One of the greatest aspects of Laravel is it’s Fluent Query Builder and Eloquent ORM. I mean, what great names. Names that the implementation fully lives up to. Sadly, I don’t touch on this because … you guessed it … the application we’re creating doesn’t need it.

What’s in this book

Mostly, me blabbing away about why I’m doing what I’m doing in creating the application. You may agree with me some of the time. You may argue with me some of the time. Sometimes you may think I’m a complete idiot. Hopefully, at times you’ll think “Oh yeah. Good one.” But in the end, you’re getting the nuts-and-bolts of creating a real system that you can use.