Books That Helped Me Become a Laravel Web Developer

I became a web-developer when YouTube tutorials weren’t still that popular. Everyone was just starting out and I had no idea where to begin. Since I didn’t know much about development, I didn’t even know which questions to ask. I pieced together a rudimentary understanding of what web-developers do by catching tech-talk from some of my coworkers in the software development department (I wasn’t in that department yet).

Read this article and others on my website:

What I heard was, “something something PHP.” Well, maybe PHP could help me, so I set out to learn PHP. I had enough sense to know that HTML was required. This was before CSS was a thing (think tables everything). By pure luck, I was hired by a company that was seeking to add a web-developer to their team. The rest is history.

The following books helped me during my struggle to become a web-developer. Just to call it out, I had zero programming knowledge before starting to read these books, and they saved me.

I must have read this book 10 times at least. Even though looking back on it now I laugh at what I used to struggle at, it was a challenging book, but a book that I could digest. Head First PHP and MySQL is probably one of the easiest books to grasp when it comes to PHP. It might be dated at this point, but still a good read. Fun fact, I am writing a new book on PHP that should be available by the end of this year.

I know what you’re saying. HTML and CSS are not programming languages. Well, I still needed to solidify the concepts. So I started back with Head First. Prior to that, it was W3Schools.

I needed to know which programming language was correct for me. So I bought, you guessed it, another Head First book. This Head First Programming book focused on Python. It might have been a bad move to mix languages, but it helped me get some programming principles under my belt.

I felt like I needed more SQL experience, so I bought another Head First book. If it works, it works. I understood their concept. Reading my Java books was too challenging at the time.

But I felt that I still needed to learn a more stricter, object oriented, programming language. So I picked Java. This was a difficult book to digest, but I muscled through it, researching topics online that I just could not grasp.

The more I read about it, the more I realized that I needed to learn JavaScript and Ajax. It took another few months to get my mind rewired to understand Ajax, but this book definitely helped me.

I wanted to get serious with PHP, so I purchased Advanced PHP Programming. This book, although already starting to show its age, helped me immensely in understanding PHP.

A couple of years later, once I was starting to make my way into the E-Commerce realm, I purchased Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL. Because I was already proficient enough in PHP/MySQL, this book was a breeze to read. Definitely one of my favorites.

This was the last book that I read on pure PHP before just starting to read Laravel books. Easy to consume and I believe I finished it in less than a week.

This is the latest version of Laravel, and I’ve read it too, but the one that got me into Laravel was the 1st edition. I was already writing code in Laravel, but these books helped me solidify my decision to code in Laravel. Another fun fact, I’m writing a Laravel book too.

I could continue this list for at least another 20–30 books, but we’ll leave it here. YouTube also made a huge impact once solid content creators emerged. I hope that the list helps you on your way too, especially if you choose the PHP/Laravel route.

Dino Cajic is currently the Head of IT at LSBio (LifeSpan BioSciences, Inc.), Absolute Antibody, Kerafast, Everest BioTech, Nordic MUbio and Exalpha. He also serves as the CEO at MyAutoSystem. He has over a decade of software engineering experience. He has a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Biology. His background consists of creating enterprise level e-commerce applications, performing research based software development, and facilitating the spread of knowledge through writing.

You can connect with him on LinkedIn, follow him on Instagram, visit his blog, or subscribe to his Medium publication.

Read every story from Dino Cajic (and thousands of other writers on Medium). Your membership fee directly supports Dino Cajic and other writers you read. You’ll also get full access to every story on Medium.