TL; DR: This book is contains various projects built in the Laravel 4 framework. At the time of writing this; the book contains roughly 300 pages (8 chapters/projects). I have planned content for an additional 4 chapters, to be completed around the end of January. I estimate it will push the page count up to around 500 pages, which is good value for $19. All future chapters, updates and corrections are free. Half of all sales go to Taylor Otwell in support of the excellent work he's doing for the Laravel framework.

I was learning how to use Laravel 4 more effectively, and found some subjects which I felt were worth sharing. I picked Medium (which later turned out to be a huge pain) and started putting a tutorial together. A few hours later I hit publish…

Then @laravelphp retweeted a link to the article. I think I spent the rest of the day just watching stats. The tutorial hit Medium's home page. It turns out there are a lot of people who wanted to know about Authentication (in Laravel), and just needed to be exposed to the article through @laravelphp's promotion of it.

Since then; I have been releasing a tutorial every two weeks.

The book grew out of the realisation that; while loads of people were reading the tutorials on Medium, some people weren't happy with the platform.

There are many compelling reasons for me to keep on using Medium to host the tutorials. I don't want to host my own thing because uptime is important, and outages in the night add years onto my life. The simple statistics and text formatting are also great.

I want to stay on Medium, but I also want people to want to read the tutorials and learn from them on other platforms. The book allows both of these things, as well as an important third thing…

The book is also intended as a means to give back to Laravel; in particular the invaluable work of Taylor Otwell. To this end, I have committed to give half of all sales to Taylor. The tutorials will always be free on Medium, and their content will mirror the chapters of this book (with obvious repetition omitted), but by purchasing this book you are helping to fund future Laravel development from him and tutorials from me.