Book excerpt: What sets Laravel apart from other PHP web frameworks? Speed and simplicity, for starters. This rapid application development framework and its ecosystem of tools let you quickly build new sites and applications with clean, readable code. Fully updated to cover Laravel 5.8, the second edition of this practical guide provides the definitive introduction to one of today’s mostpopular web frameworks. Matt Stauffer, a leading teacher and developer in the Laravel community, delivers a high-level overview and concrete examples to help experienced PHP web developers get started with this framework right away. This updated edition also covers Laravel Dusk and Horizon and provides information about community resources and other noncore Laravel packages. Dive into features, including: Blade, Laravel’s powerful custom templating tool Tools for gathering, validating, normalizing, and filtering user-provideddata The Eloquent ORM for working with application databases The role of the Illuminate request object in the application lifecycle PHPUnit, Mockery, and Dusk for testing your PHP code Tools for writing JSON and RESTful APIs Interfaces for filesystem access, sessions, cookies, caches, and search Tools for implementing queues, jobs, events, and WebSocket event publishing