I saw a post on LinkedIN inviting people to review a new book, and I thought – what the heck. I have reviewed books before, so this could be fun. So – I signed up, and was asked to blog about the book when I am done.

The book I had to review was “Laravel Design Patterns and Best Practices”. Written by Arda Kılıçdağı and H. İbrahim YILMAZ. The book is available at Packt Publishing.

As I am reading the first few chapters, I was generally impressed. As a beginner in Laravel, I found it easy, informative, and the usage of analogies were quite clever. This resonated well with me, as I learn well by understanding difficult concepts by analogy.

Talking of analogies, I am going to describe my overall experience with the book using an analogy. Imagine a comic book with nice big letters. It reads nice. The text forms pictures in your mind as you read them. Awesome. As you turn each page in the comic book, you get more immersed in the book, and you really start to enjoy it.

But suddenly, when you turn the page somewhere near the middle of the comic book, things get a little hairy. Suddenly, you are reading a printed book. No more pictures and very small print that is highly condensed with very little line spacing.

What happened here is one of two things:

• The book was aimed at absolute beginners, and then switched to advanced level without a gradual build-up. It became far too difficult for me to understand.
• The book was aimed at intermediate Laravel developers, but the inclusion of the first few chapters were to fill the pages: It is far too elementary for intermediate Laravel developers.

Now – on the Packt website, the following paragraph is found:

This book is intended for web application developers working with Laravel who want to increase the efficiency of their web applications. It assumes that you have some experience with the Laravel PHP framework and are familiar with coding OOP methods.

That brings me to the second possibility I have mentioned: that the book is aimed at intermediate Laravel developers, but that the first few chapters were only fillers, being too elementary to teach intermediate Laravel developers anything.

So, while it was a good read for me up to the point where the book lost my attention, I would recommend that:

• If you are an intermediate or advanced Laravel developer, PLEASE skip the first few chapters.
• If you are a beginner Laravel developer, PLEASE read only the first few chapters, and tackle the last bunch of chapters only once you have gotten some more experience under the belt.

I have read several Packt books before, and I generally like them, but I have to say I am slightly disappointed by this one. That being said, it is purely my own opinion, and you might find the experience with this book a lot better than I did.

Happy reading!