I've made it around 40% through, and probably won't pick it up again until I next work on a laravel project.

I picked this up while working on laravel, the text book is thorough with lots of tips and tricks on the way. Oreilly text books like this one can be quite dry, but I didn't find this overly dry probably because I was able to implement one or two ideas in a project I was on so there was abit of gold mining in the read to keep me in it. But it's not engaging enough to continue without a project to work with alongside.

Laravel is a really enjoyable framework. The MVC model and routes are similar to express. The person who created Laravel did so with the ethos of making development an enjoyable experience. So the experience you often find with Laravel is things 'just work'. The naming conventions for some of the core libraries are evocative as well for example Illuminate (Namespace), Eloquent (ORM), Artisan (CLI).