acwa_book_ru: a free Russian architecture book whose Laravel examples come as markdown

The repository is the book source, not a package

What sits in adelf/acwa_book_ru is a manuscript and a set of download links. The top level holds three entries: a.gitignore, a manuscript/ directory and readme.md. There is no composer.json, no src/ tree, no test suite and no CI configuration, so there is nothing to require into a project and nothing to run. The description field simply names the work: Книга "Архитектура сложных веб-приложений. С примерами на Laravel", the second edition of a printed title. The author identifies himself as Adel Fayzrakhmanov, who also writes the Laravel Idea plugin for PhpStorm, and links his Telegram channel.

That framing matters for adoption decisions. Teams evaluating open source projects usually want a dependency they can pin and upgrade. Its releases provide downloadable book versions, while its repository history remains available for changes. Its value is entirely in the prose and in the thirteen markdown files that make up the body of the text.

Thirteen chapters that build one layered application in order

The table of contents in readme.md is the best available map of the material, and its order matters more than any single chapter. It opens with a preface the README describes as very short but important, then moves through what the author calls bad habits, dependency injection, painless refactoring, the application layer, error handling, validation, events and unit testing. Only after those eight chapters does it reach the domain layer at chapter nine, CQRS at chapter ten and Event Sourcing at chapter eleven, closing with a conclusion.

That progression is the argument of the book. The hard patterns arrive after the unglamorous ones, so a reader who skips to the CQRS file will miss the refactoring and testing groundwork the later chapters assume. Every chapter is a separate file under manuscript/, which means the text can be read straight from the repository in a browser or cloned and searched offline. The GitHub topics reinforce the intent: architecture, cqrs, cqrs-es, grasp, laravel, php and solid. GRASP and SOLID appear side by side, and the combination with cqrs-es says the final third of the book treats the same application through two lenses.

Where to get the finished book: PDF and epub on the 2.0 release

The repository documents no installation steps, because there is nothing to install. Instead, readme.md points at two published formats, both attached to the release tagged 2.0, which the releases list dates to 2024-08-01. The PDF and the epub sit in that release's download area:

* PDF версия - https://github.com/adelf/acwa_book_ru/releases/download/2.0/acwa_rus.pdf * epub версия - https://github.com/adelf/acwa_book_ru/releases/download/2.0/acwa_rus.epub

The README also lists the paper edition across several retailers, published by БХВ, with listings on Ozon, Wildberries, Читай-город and a Kazakh shop, Flip.kz. The repository therefore offers two routes: the free digital files on GitHub, or the printed second edition.

The ebook is frozen at 2.0 while the repository keeps moving

The maintenance picture here is split in two, and only the version numbers support it. The release tagged 2.0 carries the downloadable files and was published on 2024-08-01. The last push to the repository was on 2026-07-03, more than a year later. No repository file ties the later commits to a new release, so a reader should assume the 2.0 PDF and epub reflect the text as it stood at that tag and not whatever is currently in manuscript/.

That gap is the practical caution for anyone copying code out of the book. The repository is not archived, so it is not frozen outright, yet no release has superseded 2.0 in the data available here. Laravel moves quickly and the later chapters depend on framework behaviour, so the sensible first step is to diff a chapter you intend to reuse against your own vendor directory. The last push being recent says the files are being touched; it does not say the published book has been revised.

Where this material stops and where it does not

The honest limitation is scope and language. Every example is Laravel, and the repository is written in Russian; there is no English translation in the tree and no automated translation pipeline described. A team that does not read Russian gets the architecture vocabulary from the CQRS and GRASP topics but has to source the argument elsewhere. There is also nothing for non-Laravel stacks: no Symfony, no Lumen, no framework-agnostic pseudocode is promised.

The second limitation concerns verification. The book presents patterns, not a library, so nothing here is testable by running it. There is no test harness in the repository and no CI to check that the examples still run against a Laravel release. A conventional package may instead provide a versioned artifact, installation instructions and a changelog. acwa_book_ru gives you a well-sequenced argument that you must verify yourself, chapter by chapter, against the framework you actually ship.

Licensing is the open question before you republish anything

No license identifier is recorded for this repository. The README points to a commercial print edition sold through several retailers, and the free PDF and epub are attached to a release rather than published under a named license. That combination means the absence of a LICENSE file is a fact you have to deal with, not an oversight to ignore. Attribution to the author and a link back to the repository are the minimum any reader can do. Anyone planning to mirror the text, translate it, or fold its chapters into internal documentation should settle the permission question first, and this review offers no legal advice on what the default rules allow. The safe operational advice is narrow and specific: keep the links to the 2.0 release as they are published, and do not copy the manuscript wholesale into a company wiki until the rights question is settled.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt it as reading material if you write PHP with Laravel and read Russian, and check the CQRS and Event Sourcing chapters against the version of the framework you actually run before treating the code as a starting point. Skip it if your team needs English prose, runtimes other than Laravel, or a maintained package; the repository ships no installable code, no license identifier is recorded, and the last push was on 2026-07-03.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. adelf/acwa_book_ru on GitHub
2. Issues
3. README
4. Releases