Book Review – Code Bright

I had the pleasure of reading Code Bright by Dayle Rees and it’s going to be my first Laravel book review in what I hope is a new feature here on Laravel News.

Code Bright is the follow up edition to the hugely successful Code Happy. This book is a total rewrite from the original and focuses totally on Laravel 4.x.

Code Bright is structured as journey from the very basics of learning Laravel through building a simple app. Along the way using great analogies and imagery to make things relevant, light hearted, and just plain fun to read. Squirrels, cakes, pies, hockey, pubs, it’s all included :)

If you are new to Laravel just stop reading now and go buy this book. Seriously, it’s the best introduction book for any framework I’ve seen. Really!

The beginning covers a lot of the basics you need if you are fairly new to php. This includes namespaces, composer, and JSON. These are very important early concepts to grasp when working with what is now known as “modern” php.

Next Dayle goes over the architecture of Laravel including the bootstrapping, the container, and facades. Basically how the internals are setup which will help you later on. After the architecture it goes in detail about all the important features. Routing, Blade, Eloquent, etc…

The final chapter is “Where does it go?”. This is a question that is asked a lot and Dayle tells you exactly where to put things by using a plate as an analogy. Not sure I recommend putting your dishes on the ceiling but who am I to judge?

The only thing I want to mention is I do consider this an intro or beginner book. If you’ve been developing in Laravel already then it may not be the book for you. Unless you just want to support Dayle because he is a nice lad from some land I can’t pronounce. :)

Code Bright kept my interest up the whole way and it’s not some dry book that you will struggle to wade through. Overall I really liked this book and as you can tell I do recommend it.