Welcome to the course! In this first episode, we're kicking things off by giving you an overview of exactly what we'll be building: a full-featured booking system with Laravel. Before diving into anything technical, you'll get a solid walkthrough of how the whole booking flow works and see just how flexible the system we're making will be.
We'll demo the app right from the booking UI, showing how users can select from different professionals (think employees with different skills and services), and how each has specific availability and the ability to take different types of appointments. You'll see how the calendar reflects all these settings: available times, holidays, variable working days and hours, and even gaps between appointments.
There's also a peek behind the scenes—how the employee schedules work, how holidays and exclusions are managed, and how we keep everything up-to-date and accurate even if two people try to book the same slot at the same time. We'll inspect the database structure too, just to show you how simple it can be to manage everything with an admin panel.
By the end of the episode, you'll get a real sense of the flexibility of this booking system: the ability to handle different services, unlimited schedule customization, quick and user-friendly booking (with or without payment), and the power to adapt pretty much every aspect as your needs grow.
Next up, we'll jump into setting up Laravel and PEST so we can write solid tests for our availability logic before moving on to actually building out the features and the UI. Let's get started!