Book Review – Implementing Laravel

Implementing Laravel is a book written by Chris Fidao.

First and foremost this is not a beginner book. If you are considering it then you need to know the basics of Laravel, IoC, and the principles behind SOLID.

To get you up to speed it does include a chapter on the core concepts which goes over the container and dependency injection. This is a great refresher chapter if you are comfortable with Laravel, and gives some real world uses.

Next it goes through setting up a new project. This is a chapter I really wanted to skip because I’ve created new Laravel applications dozens of times. But it’s more than that. It talks about where you should put things, environmental variable, auto loading, and a nice way of setting up the application with a namespace.

After this is where the real meat of the book comes in. The “useful patterns” chapter covers the Repository pattern, caching, validation, form processing, and error handling.

Chris goes into detail about the Repository pattern and why you would want to structure your code this way. Besides explaining it he also shows nice and simple examples using a common blog. I like real world examples instead of just theory and that helped me really understand the point.

The same goes for the “Using Packages” chapter. It builds on the error handling by showing a real world example of using a notification service to alert you on an app failure.

This is a book I would consider worth getting if you are interested in really taking your app to the next level or if you are striving to improve your knowledge and skills. I do feel you will gain way more than the price of the book.

As I said in the beginning my only warning is I do not consider this a beginner book. Depending on your background the patterns covered could be confusing until you build a real world app around it or gain more experience.