My Laravel Journey: Books That Paved the Way
I became a web-developer when YouTube tutorials weren’t still that popular. Everyone was just starting out and I had no idea where to begin. Since I didn’t know much about development, I didn’t even know which questions to ask. I pieced together a rudimentary understanding of what web-developers do by catching tech-talk from some of my coworkers in the software development department (I wasn’t in that department yet).
What I heard was, “something something PHP.” Well, maybe PHP could help me, so I set out to learn PHP. I had enough sense to know that HTML was required. This was before CSS was a thing (think tables everything). By pure luck, I was hired by a company that was seeking to add a web-developer to their team. The rest is history.
The following books helped me during my struggle to become a web-developer. Just to call it out, I had zero programming knowledge before starting to read these books, and they saved me.
I must have read this book 10 times at least. Even though looking back on it now I laugh at what I used to struggle at, it was a challenging book, but a book that I could digest. Head First PHP and MySQL is probably one of the easiest books to grasp when it comes to PHP. It might be dated at this point, but still a good read. Fun fact, I am writing a new book on PHP that should be available by the end of this year.
I know what you’re saying. HTML and CSS are not programming languages. Well, I still needed to solidify the concepts. So I started back with Head First. Prior to that, it was W3Schools.
I needed to know which programming language was correct for me. So I bought, you guessed it, another Head First book. This Head First Programming book focused on Python. It might have been a bad move to mix languages, but it helped me get some programming principles under my belt.
I felt like I needed more SQL experience, so I bought another Head First book. If it works, it works. I understood their concept. Reading my Java books was too challenging at the time.
But I felt that I still needed to learn a more stricter, object oriented, programming language. So I picked Java. This was a difficult book to digest, but I muscled through it, researching topics online that I just could not grasp.
The more I read about it, the more I realized that I needed to learn JavaScript and Ajax. It took another few months to get my mind rewired to understand Ajax, but this book definitely helped me.
I wanted to get serious with PHP, so I purchased Advanced PHP Programming. This book, although already starting to show its age, helped me immensely in understanding PHP.
A couple of years later, once I was starting to make my way into the E-Commerce realm, I purchased Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL. Because I was already proficient enough in PHP/MySQL, this book was a breeze to read. Definitely one of my favorites.
This was the last book that I read on pure PHP before just starting to read Laravel books. Easy to consume and I believe I finished it in less than a week.
This is the latest version of Laravel, and I’ve read it too, but the one that got me into Laravel was the 1st edition. I was already writing code in Laravel, but these books helped me solidify my decision to code in Laravel. Another fun fact, I’m writing a Laravel book too.
I could continue this list for at least another 20–30 books, but we’ll leave it here. YouTube also made a huge impact once solid content creators emerged. I hope that the list helps you on your way too, especially if you choose the PHP/Laravel route.