Laravel 5 Essentials

Explore the fundamentals of Laravel, one of the most expressive and robust PHP frameworks available

About This Book

• Create a dynamic web application that can read and write data to a database
• Improve your PHP skills and develop a new outlook on solving programming issues
• A step-by-step guide that covers the different steps involved in creating a complete Laravel application in an easy-to-understand manner

Who This Book Is For

This book is intended for PHP web developers who have an interest in Laravel and who know the basics of the framework in theory, but don’t really know how to use it in practice. No experience of using frameworks is required, but it is assumed you are at least familiar with building dynamic websites in PHP already.

What You Will Learn

• Set up a development environment for working with Laravel apps
• Create a working Laravel application from start to finish
• Interact with data and discover Eloquent, Laravel’s own ORM
• Create and run migrations and seeds
• Simplify command-line tasks by building Artisan commands
• Protect your app by securing it from common security vulnerabilities
• Perform end-to-end testing after learning the basics of testing in Laravel
• Learn about Laravel’s other features including service providers, packages, queue workers, and helpers for working with strings and arrays

In Detail

Laravel has established itself as one of the most popular PHP frameworks over the past couple of years. Its popularity comes due to its ease of use, expressive syntax, and the number of components it has, allowing you to achieve practically any task in a modern PHP application.

If you’ve not had the opportunity to dive into Laravel yet, then this book will be the perfect companion, as it covers the fundamentals Laravel is built on in a thorough yet easy-to-follow manner. To make this book your best learning source, we have covered integral topics such as preparing an environment for working with Laravel applications, creating your first Laravel application from start to finish, a tour of Laravel’s ORM Eloquent, and more advanced topics such as testing, user authentication, and security. Being one of the most interesting features in Laravel, we also cover an overview of Artisan, including descriptions of some of its tasks. Post this, we talk about testing and security. By the end of this book, you will be able to create robust PHP websites and web applications quickly and efficiently.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Laravel
Chapter 2: Setting Up a Development Environment
Chapter 3: Your First Application
Chapter 4: Eloquent conventions
Chapter 5: Testing – It’s Easier Than You Think
Chapter 6: A Command-line Companion Called Artisan
Chapter 7: Authentication and Security
Appendix: An Arsenal of Tools