LAMP Stack Development: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and Laravel

LAMP Stack Development is the third volume of the Web Coding Series. It moves the work to the server. You administer a Linux machine instead of renting a control panel, understand an Apache configuration line by line, design a MySQL schema for the queries it will actually receive, write PHP the way it is written in version 8.5 rather than in 2009, and use Laravel for applications that have outgrown a folder of scripts.

Almost every example was run. The book was built and tested on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with Apache 2.4.66, MySQL 9.7 LTS, PHP 8.5 and Laravel 13, and the listings show the output they actually produced: shell sessions, curl responses, query plans, deadlocks between two live sessions, test runner failures and rendered pages. The EC2 walkthrough ran on a real AWS instance. Where something needs a paid service or a public domain that a test run cannot provide, the book says so instead of inventing a result.

What you will learn

Linux: the shell and filesystem, users, permissions and sudo, apt and dnf, systemd services that survive a reboot, networking and firewalls, SSH and keys, htop, pm2 and supervisord, cron and journalctl, text processing, a local stack in WSL2 or Docker, Amazon EC2 from launch to teardown, what the cloud really costs, and TLS certificates with Let's Encrypt.

Apache: the essentials, TLS and HTTP/2, PHP-FPM and proxying, and above all .htaccess: AllowOverride and the override classes, the directory walk and its measured cost, mod_rewrite in real depth, redirects and canonical URLs, front-controller routing, authentication, hotlink protection, caching, compression and security headers, complete paste-ready recipes and systematic troubleshooting.

MySQL: installation and the release model, SQL and CRUD, data types, table design, joins, subqueries and CTEs, functions, aggregation and window functions, JSON, full-text and spatial data, normalization, indexes, EXPLAIN and query tuning, server tuning and the Performance Schema, transactions and locking, stored routines and triggers, users, roles and SQL injection, backup, replication and partitioning, and managed MySQL in the cloud.

PHP 8.5: types, functions and closures, arrays, strings and PCRE, dates and time zones, files and streams, objects, interfaces, traits and generators, enums, readonly classes, property hooks and attributes, Composer, errors and logging, forms, sessions and uploads, PDO, security against the OWASP Top 10, JSON and HTTP clients, email, images and PDFs, PHPUnit and Pest, static analysis, OPcache and PHP-FPM tuning, and asynchronous PHP with fibers, ReactPHP, AMPHP, Swoole and FrankenPHP.

Laravel 13: routing, middleware, controllers, Blade, Vite, Livewire and Inertia, validation, migrations, the query builder, Eloquent and its relationships, eager loading and the N+1 problem, authentication and authorization, caching, storage, mail and notifications, queues and scheduling, the service container, APIs with Sanctum, real-time broadcasting with Reverb, testing and a zero-downtime deployment, followed by a fair survey of Symfony, CodeIgniter, Slim, Phalcon and the other PHP frameworks.