Matt Stauffer has been busy writing a book to help people get "Up and Running" with the Laravel framework. However, life has caused delays (in the form of a new little girl) but he's back with an update on the book's status and some answers to frequently asked questions about it.

It's been a tumultuous summer, what with Stauffer Child #2 arriving and me finally finishing Laravel: Up and Running. A lot of folks have been asking me about timelines for the book, so let me share what we have here.

He talks about how, despite finishing the actual writing of the book already, the other things that came up added some delays to the final version being ready (like the baby and Laravel v5.3). He wanted the latest from 5.3 to be in the book, so portions were added and updated to include them. For those that just can't wait, there's already a pre-release version you can buy or you can wait until the October/November release date. He ends the post answering a few questions covering who the book is for, what version of Laravel it's for and what it offers that the documentation can't.

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.

If you're interested in the Laravel framework and possibly using it for your upcoming projects but aren't sure where to start, you should consider checking out Matt Stauffer's upcoming O'Reilly book "Laravel: Up and Running". According to this post on the Laravel News site the book is now available for pre-order.

Matt Stauffer has been writing a new book on Laravel named Laravel: Up and Running: A Framework for Building Modern PHP Apps and it’s published by O’Reilly Media. [...] This first edition is 250 pages and will come in either paperback or ebook form, but this current preorder is only available in paperback. Based on Amazon the expected shipping date is August 25, 2016.

The book walks you through the creation of a Laravel application from start to finish. it's no meant as a reference but a "work book" to teach the foundations of the framework. It hopes to provide a single point where developers, especially those familiar with "C-family programming languages", will be able to get started quickly.