In this article, I’ll give a mini-review of the book Laravel Up & Running, which was originally written in English and later translated into other languages. By the way, I’ve read this book twice—the second time in Russian, after the translation came out.
Advantages:
- Basic topics, concepts, and framework principles are explained in an accessible, easy, and understandable way
- Great for beginners, though even experienced programmers might find it useful to refresh their knowledge on some concepts
- Covers a huge amount of material, and for building simple to medium projects, the book is 100% sufficient
- Plenty of practical examples, of course
Disadvantages:
- Laravel evolves very quickly, so you won’t find the latest innovations or modern concepts in the book
- Not much information on working with APIs (which, in my opinion, is one of the framework’s main purposes), and little mention of the Laravel ecosystem or third-party projects and packages closely tied to the framework and often used in real-world projects
- The book is around 800 pages long, and many might not make it to the end (though personally, I don’t consider its length a drawback, especially since it has many examples and is easy to read—even in English)
Overall thoughts:
This book is a great fit for those who want to get acquainted with the framework but, for some reason, don’t want to deal with the official documentation. If you already know a PHP backend framework (say, Symfony or Yii) and want to quickly get up to speed with a new one, you should definitely start with this book. And while it’s not meant for highly specialized Laravel use cases, even after reading just a small part, you’ll be able to develop your own web applications using Laravel.
I first read this book in 2020 and gladly reread it later. So, personally, it left a very positive impression on me. Even with my solid knowledge of the framework, I managed to compile 15 pages of useful notes with new information like: "Oh, cool, I didn’t know you could do that, even after working with the framework for so many years" or "Interesting helper—definitely gonna use it in the future."
