Hi guys! As you may have heard I am going to attempt to publish an eBook. Crazy right? I can barely write my own name, so this will be a little adventure for me, you can think of it as my Everest.
The book will comprise of the tutorials that I write here, cleaned up with a little extra "booky" stuff so they don't look weird. It will be published as we go along, you buy it once and you get updates for life!
Now the book does have a price, but I wan't to assure my readers that the tutorials will still be posted here for free. Why would you bother buying the book then? Well you don't have to at all, I love Laravel and I want to make my tutorials available to as many people as possible so they can learn how wonderful the framework really is, but if you would like to 'reward' me for my time spent on them, or 'bribe' me so that I continue writing these things, or even if you just want a nice reference copy of all my tutorials that you can read on your kindle, you can.
You see people normally just put up a 'donate here' button, or a buy me a beer. Well if you did that, I might get a beer out of it, but you would just lose money, damn that's not fair at all. So I thought why not give something back? You know? I get a beer, you get a book, that sort of thing. We both win, it will be a great feeling!
The book will be available in .mobi ePub and PDF so you can read it on your PC, or take it with you on your hitch-hikers guid... Kindle. It will be re-published every time I add something new, this includes trying to keep it up to date for future versions of Laravel, and if you have already paid for it, you can download the updates as many times as you want, thanks to the guys at Leanpub.com. As far as I know this is the first book based on the Laravel framework! Wanna see the cover? It's kinda cute.
Thanks to my girlfriend Emma for the photo, un-shopped, just a generally happy panda! He has been using Laravel. You have probably guessed this by now but Red Panda's are really fussy coders, unless their code is truly expressive, they are not happy! Most people think that Red Panda's are kinda rare, but the truth is we have too many here in Wales, in fact I am using one as a footrest right now, another pair are dancing for my amusement, and at night we use them instead of pillows; they have better stuffing you see..
Overdue Thanks
I would like to say thanks to all of you who have been reading my tutorials, and providing enthusiastic and helpful feedback. Writing this kinda thing is a first for me, I simply wanted to share with the world how great Laravel is to use, and in doing so my blog stats have turned from depressingly poor, to no longer a loner! Really check this out!
Some unfortunately sad, to many people! Hurray!
Now unfortunately I have got a little off track due to sorting out the Book stuff, but the next tutorial will arrive tonight, and it covers using the Fluent Query Builder to handle database interactions.
The book itself is almost ready to release the first published version, the publisher currently has a little bug with their PDF generation effecting the headers, if it can't be fixed soon I will release anyway but promise to fix this in the future, the Kindle and ePub versions look great.
Expect a release later today if the headers get fixed, early next week if not!
Thanks again everyone!