Building a full-stack app requires a wide variety of knowledge, not just about Vue and Laravel, but also Vue Router, Vuex, and Webpack, not to mention JavaScript, PHP, and web development in general.
As such, one of the biggest challenges for me as the author was deciding what should and shouldn't be included. The topics I ultimately settled upon arose as answers to one of the two following questions:
- What are the essential features, tools, and design patterns that the reader will use in all, or most, of their Vue.js apps?
- What are the key issues of designing and building full-stack Vue.js apps as opposed to other architectures?
Here's how the chosen topics are distributed across the chapters of the book:
Chapter 1, Hello Vue - An Introduction to Vue.js, presents an overview of Vue.js, and the book's case-study project, Vuebnb.
Chapter 2, Prototyping Vuebnb, Your First Vue.js Project, provides a practical introduction to the essential features of Vue.js, including installation, template syntax, directives, lifecycle hooks and so on.
Chapter 3, Setting Up a Laravel Development Environment, shows how to set up a new Laravel project for inclusion in a full-stack Vue.js app.
Chapter 4, Building a Web Service with Laravel, is about laying the foundations of the backend of our case-study project, by setting up the database, models, and API endpoints.
Chapter 5, Integrating Laravel and Vue.js with Webpack, explains how a sophisticated Vue app will require a build step, and introduces Webpack for bundling project assets.
Chapter 6, Composing Widgets with Vue.js Components, teaches how components are an essential concept of modern UI development and one of the most powerful features of Vue.js.
Chapter 7, Building a Multi-Page App with Vue Router, introduces Vue Router and shows how we can add virtual pages to a frontend app.
Chapter 8, Managing Your Application State with Vuex, explains how state management is a must-have feature for managing complex UI data. We introduce the Flux pattern and Vuex.
Chapter 9, Adding a User Login and API Authentication With Passport, focuses on one of the trickiest aspects of full-stack apps—authentication. This chapter shows how to use Passport for secure AJAX calls to the backend.
Chapter 10, Deploying a Full-Stack App to the Cloud, describes how to build and deploy our completed project to a cloud-based server and use a CDN for serving static assets.
