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.