« back — written by Brent on August 26, 2020

Laravel Beyond CRUD is here!

It's been over a year in the making and I happy to say it's here: the Laravel Beyond CRUD book and video course are now available. Regular followers already know what it is about, but I happily repeat it in case you're new.

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I've been writing and maintaining several larger-than-average web applications for years now. Projects that take a team of developers to work on them for at least a year, oftentimes longer. In their cases, the well-known, default Laravel approach to building CRUD applications doesn't scale all that well. These projects become large, difficult to navigate and maintain.

So over the past few years I've looked at several architectures which would help me and our team improve the maintainability of these projects, as well as help make the development process easier, both for us and our clients. These are architectures and patterns like Domain Driven Design, Hexagonal Architectures, and Event Sourcing, amongst others.

Because most of our projects are large but not ginormous, these architectures as a whole are almost always overkill. So instead we took the best parts from all of them, and combined them in a pragmatic approach.

In this book, I'll write about the knowledge we gained over the years in designing these projects. I will take a close look at the Laravel way and what did and didn't work for us. This book is for you if you're dealing with those kinds of larger projects, and want practical and pragmatic solutions in managing them. I will talk about theory, patterns, and principles, though everything will be in context of a real-life web application.

In this book I'll give you concrete solutions to real life problems, but its actual goal is to teach you a mindset. I want to share the process we went through, so that you can apply it to your problems, and come up with the solutions that work best for you.

My colleague Freek phrased it like this:

Don't dogmatically keep following rules you agreed on in the past, but keep challenging them.

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Besides the book, I've also created an additional video course: some episodes take written theory and visualise it, others will dive deep into code in ways a book couldn't do.

I believe this course will help you in designing and managing large applications, no matter what background you're coming from. The beauty of it — if I can say so myself — is that all patterns and principles described can be taken out of the context I personally work in, and applied to many other kinds of projects, even outside of Laravel.

So if your interest is piqued, you can take a look over here: https://laravel-beyond-crud.com/!

PS: both the book and video course are a living product: the book might get small revisions over time, and I'm already working on a couple of new videos that will be added to the course over the next few weeks. So keep your eye out for even more content to come!