If you are associated with the field of web development, you know how important data is. The web runs on data, so it's essential for developers to think of quick and effective ways to deal with it. Eloquent is an awesome ORM that comes with the Laravel PHP framework. It is unique and is very beneficial to developers as it allows them to define models, relationships, and many complex operations with a really easy and intuitive syntax, without sacrificing performance. Performing an interesting number of operations on multiple tables without writing long queries with objects will be a bed of roses.
This book will take you through developing brilliant data-based applications with Eloquent, the Laravel framework ORM.
You will do the following:
Build highly efficient applications with the Eloquent ORM using an expressive syntax
Get to grips with the power of relationships and how Eloquent handles them
Go beyond simple theory with various step-by-step code examples
So, let's get started!
Chapter 1, Setting Up Our First Project, will discuss how to deal with Composer and Homestead. We will also cover the installation process of our very first Laravel project.
Chapter 2, Building the Database with the Schema Builder Class, will discuss the Schema Builder Class. We will analyze everything you can do with the class, look at different types of indexing, and learn about the methods that the Schema class provides.
Chapter 3, The Most Important Element – the Model!, will help us implement some "create," "read," "update," and "delete" logic for our items. We will also explore some useful methods and features of the model class.
Chapter 4, Exploring the World of Relationships, will help us discover how to work with different types of relationships and how to query and use them in a comfortable and clean way. Also, we will learn how to insert and delete related models in our database, or update existing ones.
Chapter 5, Using Collections to Enhance Results, will talk about collections. We will work with some results transformation methods and with the elements that make up a collection.
Chapter 6, Everything under Control with Events and Observers, will allow us to learn everything about the events in the context of Eloquent models. Right after, we will cover model events and model observers.
Chapter 7, Eloquent… without Laravel!, will explore the structure of the database package and see what is inside it. After that, we will learn how to install the "illuminate/database" package separately for your project and how to configure it for its first use. Yes, exactly: Eloquent without Laravel!
Chapter 8, It's Not Enough! Extending Eloquent, Advanced Concepts, will explore two different ways to extend Eloquent, and move on to learn about the Repository pattern.
This book has no specific requests about hardware or software; we will use Vagrant to set up a standard virtual machine as a foundation for the example projects and code snippets. So, don't worry, my friend! No long afternoons or nights will be passed on the Apache or Nginx configuration files.
This book is perfect for developers with a basic knowledge of PHP development, but who are new to the Eloquent ORM. However, developers with previous Laravel and Eloquent experience will also benefit from the in-depth analysis of specific classes and methodologies in the book.
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: "In the EventServiceProvider class, you can add a special event listener and bind it to a certain closure."
A block of code is set as follows:
User::saved(function($user)
{
// doing something here, after User save operation (both create and update)...
});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: "All you have to do is to go on the Download page of the Composer website and find the right method for your operating system."
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