What sets Laravel apart from other PHP web frameworks? Speed & simplicity for starters This rapid application development framework & its vast ecosystem of tools let you quickly build new sites & applications with clean readable code With this practical guide Matt Stauffer-a leading teacher & developer in the Laravel community-provides the definitive introduction to one of today's most popular web frameworks The book's high-level overview & concrete examples will help experienced PHP web developers get started with Laravel right away By the time you reach the last page you should feel comfortable writing an entire application in Laravel from scratch Dive into several features of this framework including Blade Laravel's powerful custom templating tool Tools for gathering validating normalizing & filtering user-provided data Laravel's Eloquent ORM for working with the application's databases The Illuminate request object & its role in the application lifecycle PHPUnit Mockery & PHPSpec for testing your PHP code Laravel's tools for writing JSON & RESTful APIs Interfaces for file system access sessions cookies caches & search Tools for implementing queues jobs events & Web Socket event publishing Laravel's specialty packages Scout Passport Cashier Echo Elixir Valet & Socialite