Time for a heavy disclaimer. I received a copy of this to review; though it was not my first choice of books to review. I wanted to avoid reviewing other Laravel 4 books because I am in the process of writing a Laravel 4 book. It’s called Laravel 4 Cookbook. That makes me the least partial and most informed person to be making this review. It’s honest and subjective.

I received a free copy of this book, to review.

Structure

This book contains roughly 90 task-based tutorials, all roughly 3-4 pages in length. Each tutorial begins with a short introductory paragraph, and continues on to a point-form summary of code and configuration. As the tutorials are so short; there are usually between 4 and 8 steps to complete a task. The tasks expand on the official documentation; filling a gap in which API meets real-world tasks.

The layout of each task is formulaic, and while this breeds consistency; it hurts context. There are many tasks where I would have preferred more descriptive text. Many of the code points also need description closer to code. Sometimes “In the views/common directory, open header.php and use this code as follows” is not enough to justify strange or new code.

I also missed syntax highlighting. The book is about code and syntax-highlighting is as important to reading code as grammar is to reading a novel. I can understand when self-publishers omit this sort of thing; because of the limitations of their cheap-as-free tools, but big publishing outfits have the resources to ensure this sort of slip-up doesn’t happen.

Content

I enjoyed most of the tasks, though there were some obscure sections on setup (right in the beginning of the book). There are a broad range of topics; including forms, authentication, database, controllers, routing, views, packages, security and testing. There are also many tasks focussed on JavaScript and third-party service integration. These range, in difficulty, from beginner to intermediate.

The content is suited to short bursts of development activity. Since the tasks are short and quick; the book finds it’s place as a reference book. Need to implement OAuth and remember reading about it in the cookbook? Pull it off the shelf and flip to that chapter! While this is the reason I have many of the books that I do; it’s not the best for prolonged learning/development sessions. At around the twentieth consecutive task, they all start to blend together until you start to forget what you’ve already done.

The best way you can use this book is to pick a handful of tasks you want to achieve and learn them. Remember what you’ve done, each session, and know where to find them again when the time comes to implement in a real-world situation. It’s good for that!