What sets Laravel apart from other PHP web frameworks? Speed and simplicity, for starters. This rapid application development framework and its vast ecosystem of tools let you quickly build new sites and applications with clean, readable code. With this practical guide, Matt Stauffer--a leading teacher and developer in the Laravel community--provides the definitive introduction to one of today's most popular web frameworks. The book's high-level overview and 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, and filtering user-provided data Laravel's Eloquent ORM for working with the application's databases The Illuminate request object, and its role in the application lifecycle PHPUnit, Mockery, and PHPSpec for testing your PHP code Laravel's tools for writing JSON and RESTful APIs Interfaces for file system access, sessions, cookies, caches, and search Tools for implementing queues, jobs, events, and WebSocket event publishing Laravel's specialty packages: Scout, Passport, Cashier, Echo, Elixir, Valet, and Socialite.