In this new post to his site Freek Van der Herten shares some of the things he learned from reading the book "Laravel: Up and Running", helping you to get a Laravel application up, running and understood easily.

Matt Stauffer is currently putting the final touches on his new book called Laravel: Up And Running. It aims to be a good guide for newcomers to the framework. But even if you’ve got some experience with Laravel, it should be worth your time to read it. Even Matt himself picked up a lot of cool stuff while writing it.

During my holiday I read an advance copy of the book containing all chapters expect the ones that touch on Laravel 5.3 specific functionality. I can say that it is very well written and it complements the official documentation well. Here are some of the things I’ve learned from reading this book.

His list of "lessons learned" includes topics like:

• Sending a download response
• Sharing a variable with all Blade views
• Using closure based commands
• Eager load the number of related records

Each one comes with a bit of code, mostly just one line (as that's all it takes) but it's interesting to see some of these handy tips and tricks to make it easier to work with the Laravel framework in your applications.