Welcome to the course "Up and Running with PEST"! In this intro episode, we kick things off by talking about what you'll learn and the project we'll be working on.
First up, you'll see that PEST is a slick testing framework for PHP. We're going to use it closely with Laravel, but it's not tied just to Laravel—you'll learn its whole feature set. The goal here is to get super comfortable writing tests with PEST by the end of the course.
We also take a quick tour of the real-world app we’ll build: Book Friends. It's a platform where you can sign up, add books you want to read (or are reading or have read), and connect with friends. There’s a social element, like sending and accepting friend requests, tracking what books your friends are reading, and managing your own bookshelf.
You’ll see some of this in action as we demo signing up, adding books, updating their status, and connecting with friends. The friend feature is a big focus, and we’ll be working through its complexity together, especially test-driving it.
After checking out the app, we also look at the kinds of tests we’ll write—mainly feature tests but with some unit tests sprinkled in (especially for the friend system). You get a sneak peek at the test suite in action, with PEST running every test and making sure everything’s green.
Next up: we’ll get Laravel and PEST set up, so you’re ready to build, test, and learn by doing! 🚀