Chapter 1, Welcome to the World of Laravel, introduces the basic MVC concepts and Laravel 4 to you and explains why you should develop your next project in Laravel 4.

Chapter 2, Let's Begin the Journey, explains how to install Laravel 4 and the configuration settings you may need to change.

Chapter 3, Creating a Simple CRUD Application in Hours, will take you through a 360-degree spin ride of how awesome Laravel is for simple CRUD applications and how you can build them with Laravel 4 in hours instead of days.

Chapter 4, Building a Real-life Application with Laravel 4 – The Foldagram, explains how to start a real-world project in Laravel 4. It starts with the requirements. It also explains how you can build migrations in Laravel to manage your database in versions. Then, at the end of the chapter, it explains how to build the frontend of your project as well as some of the frontend features of the project.

Chapter 5, Creating a Cart Package for Our Application, explains how Laravel 4 handles packages. Then, it includes the core concepts of the Laravel framework for us to understand the relationship between packages and the IoC container and learn how we can create packages. Then, at the end, we will see how to build our own Cart package, which can be used in our project as well as other projects.

Chapter 6, User Management and Payment Gateway Integration, explains how to build user registration, login, and dashboard pages for our project. You will learn how to authenticate users and to integrate the cart with the payment gateway. You will also learn how to utilize existing Laravel packages, and how to find them and integrate them in your projects.

Chapter 7, The Admin Section, explains how to build the administration area of our project. You will learn how to build the backend foundation of the project and then the features of our project, such as managing orders, exporting orders, adding credit to users, managing users, resetting passwords, and blocking users.

Chapter 8, Building a RESTful API with Laravel – Store Locator, explains how we can create RESTful applications with Laravel and also how to build an Ajax-powered, one-page store locator application based on the RESTful API built with Laravel.

Chapter 9, Optimizing and Securing Our Applications, explains how you can optimize your applications with the Laravel profiler and how to add security layers in Your application.

Chapter 10, Deploying Laravel Applications, explains how to deploy Laravel applications. It teaches you how to deploy application with FTP or SSH and how to use Git to manage automatic deployments.

Chapter 11, Creating a Workflow and Useful Laravel Packages and Tools, explains some of the useful packages that can be used to create web applications rapidly in Laravel. It also gives some tips on the tools and workflows that will make your life easy as a developer.

Throughout this book, I have assumed that you have the following programs/packages installed:

If you don't have them, don't worry. Chapter 2, Let's Begin the Journey of this book will guide you through installing them.

This book is for developers who are new to the Laravel framework as well as developers who want to explore the new breed of Laravel 4, which has been completely redeveloped by Taylor Otwell. You will need to know the basics of PHP and MySQL as well as some basic concepts about object-oriented programming.

If you are tired of dealing with the old way of developing PHP applications and want to use Laravel 4 to manage your project and learn how to do it step-by-step, then this book is for you.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "You can define RESTful controllers via Laravel 4, and Controllers can have a predefined method to receive a request via GET, PUT, DELETE, POST, and UPDATE."

A block of code is set as follows:

$env = $app->detectEnvironment(array(
   'local' => array('your-machine-name'),
   'production' => array('example.com'),
));

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

return array(
      'connections' => array(
               'mysql' => array(
               'driver'    => 'mysql',
               'host'      => 'db.example.com',
               'database'  => 'myapp',
               'username'  => 'myappuser',
               'password'  => 'myapppassword',
               'charset'   => 'utf8',
               'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
               'prefix'    => '',
            ),
      )
);

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

# php artisan routes

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Also, we have an Add User button which will allow the user to add a new user into the system."

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To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.

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