Preface
Application frameworks have grown in popularity over the past five years. There has been a tremendous shift from handwriting all code to leveraging these powerful frameworks with prebuilt components and features. However, with anything that comes to be in fashion, there are now a lot of contending options, and each of them viable.
While CodeIgniter was one of the first frameworks to enjoy widespread popularity, this popularity would come to be its undoing years later, as its large spread use and low barrier to entry meant it couldn't take advantage of newer versions of PHP without losing backwards compatibility, and potentially breaking lots of applications. This saw it then be surpassed by faster-moving alternatives such as Symfony and even FuelPHP, which was developed as a response to CodeIgniter's unwillingness to embrace change.
Enter: Laravel. Laravel joined the framework scene when there were already many players. However, the developers of Laravel used this timing to their advantage, instead creating a framework that avoided all of the problems and mistakes previous full stack frameworks had made and building on top of the excellent Symfony components in order to create a robust, component-based framework.
Instead of providing dozens of inflexible libraries, Laravel provides sensible, driver-based components that developers could use to build applications their own way, rather than trying to mash everything into the layout the framework author defined. This led to Laravel rising in popularity. It was also a fast-moving framework, and, by version 4, had become the most starred framework on GitHub, a testament to its popularity.
This book will give you a tour of Laravel and its core features. We'll look at how to manage multiple Laravel applications on the same machine and then we'll go ahead and start building our own Laravel application from scratch through to completion. Once we've got a basic application reading and writing data from a database, we'll take a look at Eloquent, Laravel's ORM, which is what makes it easy to read and write from a database and the more advanced features it offers. From there, we'll look at Artisan, Laravel's command-line utility, and even how to define our own commands. We'll then learn how to write automated tests for our application to make sure it keeps working the way we want it to, even with future developments. Then, finally, we'll look at how to build login and registration systems using Laravel's user authentication component.
By the end of the book, you'll have a complete Laravel application, as well as the tools and knowledge of how to build your own Laravel-based applications unassisted, and where to continue your learning of the framework.
