Laravel: Up and Running: A Framework for Building Modern PHP Apps (pdf)

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