What this book covers
Chapter 1, An Introduction to Laravel, takes a look at application frameworks in PHP in general, a recent history of the Laravel framework, and the principles that the Laravel framework is built upon.
Chapter 2, Setting Up a Development Environment, lays the foundation for what’s needed to build Laravel applications by installing and configuring the Homestead virtual machine and the Composer dependency manager.
Chapter 3, Your First Application, builds a working application in Laravel from start to finish. Here is where the fun begins!
Chapter 4, Eloquent ORM, takes a look at Eloquent, the object relation mapper that ships with Laravel and allows you to query your databases easily.
Chapter 5, Testing – It’s Easier Than You Think, goes over the various approaches to test your Laravel applications to make sure they’re as solid as possible and still work as intended after adding new features.
Chapter 6, A Command-line Companion Called Artisan, helps us meet Artisan, the command-line utility for Laravel. We cover the commands Artisan offers out of the box, as well as how to create our own command-line tools.
Chapter 7, Authentication and Security, shows you the various ways to protect your Laravel applications from common attacks, as well as how to authenticate and authorize users accessing your application.
Appendix, An Arsenal of Tools, covers the arsenal of tools that Laravel provides, which haven’t been covered in the previous chapters.
What you need for this book
As Laravel is a PHP-based application framework, you will need a code editor or IDE with syntax highlighting for PHP.
We’ll be using the Homestead virtual machine, which requires both Vagrant and VirtualBox to be installed on your machine; installation instructions for both of these will be provided later in the book.
Also, if you plan to deploy applications to a live web server, then you will need an FTP client or SSH access to the remote web server in order to move the files from your local machine to the web-accessible server.
Who this book is for
This book is primarily aimed at those interested in learning about the Laravel framework, as maybe they’ve heard about it but not had the chance or time to become familiar with it. Therefore, knowledge of PHP and related technologies (such as MySQL) is assumed, as is knowledge of object-oriented programming.