On Medium.com there's a recent post reviewing the book "Getting Started with Laravel 4". In the review Christopher Pitt briefly covers both the good and bad parts of the book.

This book is aimed at newcomers to PHP development, and to Laravel 4 in particular. It doesn’t disappoint. It starts slow, talking about the need for, and role filled by frameworks. It explains what Composer does, and why it’s useful for frameworks like Laravel. It’s not the typical “Laravel needs Composer, here’s the code you use” stuff. There are 40 pages of what is essentially a very gentle introduction, before you even start writing code.

He talks about the sample application the book walks you through creating and some other topics around it including unit testing and artisan commands. He mentions the more popular Code Bright book and points out that he believes it (Code Bright) to be a better deal for the money if you're looking for the more comprehensive intro to Laravel.