Introduction
Over the years PHP has grown up into a powerful and popular language for web applications. Without an underlying framework PHP-powered web applications can become messy and nearly impossible to extend or maintain. A framework that has session management, ORM, built-in authentication, and templating saves developers’ time by providing the components that are necesary in most web applications. Open source PHP framework called Laravel provides all these components and many more, making you a very efficient developer capable of building better applications a whole lot faster. Laravel allows you to focus on the code that matters instead of constantly reinventing the wheel.
Using well-designed diagrams and source code, this book will serve a great introduction to Laravel PHP framework. It will guide you through usage of Laravel’s major components to create powerful web applications. The book begins with an overview of a Laravel-powered web application and its parts, introduces you to concepts about routing, responses and views, then moves onto understanding controllers, dependency injection and database operations. You’ll explore Laravel’s powerful ORM called Eloquent, simple templating language called Blade and session management. You’ll also learn how to implement authentication and protect your applications, learn how to build your own API’s applying the concepts learned in the book.
About the author
My name is Maksim Surguy. I am a full time web developer, part time writer and former breakdancer. If you use Laravel PHP framework or Bootstrap, you might have seen some of the websites I created with Laravel:
I love creating new products and in the process I try to share as much as I possibly can. You can read free web development tutorials on my blog at http://maxoffsky.com, my other book (http://maxoffsky.com/frontend), and you can follow me on Twitter for various web development tips and tricks at http://twitter.com/msurguy
Prerequisites
In order to use the book correctly, the reader should:
- Have some experience with command line (like creating and deleting files and folders, listing all files in a directory)
- Have heard of MVC but not necessarily have much experience using it
- Have basic understanding of OOP PHP
- Know how to create a basic database with PHPMyAdmin, other GUI tools or with a command line
If you don’t have some of the skills necessary to keep up with the book’s material, please feel free to ask me for pointers to some great resources.
Source Code
The source code for this book is available for each chapter and is located on Github at https://github.com/msurguy/laravel-first-framework. Feel free to explore it, comment on it and improve it on Github.