How to learn Laravel?

Laravel is the PHP’s most famous and useful framework. We have few others like Phalcon, Symfony, Yii, Codeigniter and few more but amongst all of them Laravel is superior. And there are many reasons for that. I will like to name few of the features which makes Laravel a bit more superior. This features are Composer,  Artisan, Database migrations and much more that we will talk about later. So today I have decided to share a simple guideline with you guys which will help you to create a simple schedule to learn Laravel.

What we will be talking about?

• What is Laravel?
• How can it be useful?
• What skills are required to learn Laravel?
• Where I can learn Laravel?
• How should I make myself a Pro?

What is Laravel?

Well, As I told you before Laravel is a framework of PHP that allows a developer to work in MVC environment. Once you will learn it, things will be very easy for you to handle. For example you will not need to create many html pages for your project, instead you can create a master.blade.php file and then keep extending it….

I know that you don’t know much about master.blade.php or whatever it is, but you will learn more about it once you will start learning Laravel. And as I said before, that it is the PHP’s most popular framework. So it will be good for you if you can learn it.

How can it be useful?

Laravel also provides you a much neat interface since all the syntax is object-oriented. So just write a few classes, create new methods and that’s it. Since Laravel is the most popular framework, you will see many people asking for a Laravel developer.

Go to any freelancing website and search for PHP developers section. You will shortly notice that many people are already there to hire a Laravel developer.

So it can be useful in both ways, to earn money and obviously to enhance your programming skills.

What skills are required to learn Laravel?

This is an important question. Before start learning Laravel, make sure that you are familiar with Object-oriented Programming, PHP and MVC pattern(If you are not familiar with MVC pattern then you can still have a try but then things will be more complicated for you to learn). However, it is necessary to learn PHP and OOP(Object Oriented Programming) before digging into Laravel.

Where I can learn Laravel?

Many people have been asking this question on Quora, Yahoo Answer and even on Stackoverflow. Actually, it cannot have a single answer. It depends on you that how you want to learn something and when.

If you are a good book reader, then you can read this book ‘Learning Laravel 5’. Here is the link for the book, you can read it online too.

If you are a Blog reader, then there are already tons of resources available on internet from where you can learn few basic concepts of Laravel. I will like you to read Laravel Documentation first, then keep searching on Google about new resources and articles.

Now comes the best way to learn Laravel. You can read a book or read documentation but they will be never enough. There will be always something left unanswered in your mind. Therefore you will need to have a look at a video tutorial series.

Yes, that is right. Learning from a video tutorial series is much easier than reading books and documentation. You can ask your queries from the author in the comment section or from people who have better understanding of the programming language which you are learning.

To be very honest with you guys, I directly went to Laracast. Because they have few tremendously excellent video tutorials.

Here is the link of episode 1, but do not just stick here. Make sure that you do these starting tutorials as quickly as you can because the next videos will have more fun and more object oriented programming.

How should I make myself a Pro?

Good question indeed. I will like to quote an old saying; ‘Practice makes a man perfect’. Yeah, that’s true. Practice will be your first and final weapon to eliminate any obstacle which will be in your way.

But it’s good to learn from other people’s experience. Price Imam Ali(Peace be upon him) said; ‘Experience saves from mistakes, but experience is obtained by mistakes‘.

No one will want to do a mistake, right? So that’s why I was talking about learning from other people’s experiences and mistakes. For that you will need to join a developer’s community.

Stackoverflow and Quora are my favorite. They have a good user-friendly interface and there are lots of experienced people around these communities.

So start your first project(It will be good to stick with Laracast “my-first-app” project, if you do not have your own project.), try to do everything correctly. If there is a mistake or something that you can not sort-out yourself. Then move to Quora or Stackoverflow. By the way, you can also ask your queries on Laracast comment box.

Conclusion

In the end, I will like to ask you guys to keep learning. Obviously, you cannot learn something without travail and hurdle. But make sure that you put your efforts on the right place. Wasting your time on useless things is not a good thing for sure, so it will be good to first read more guidelines about learning Laravel and then create a simple schedule and start implementing your plan. Eventually, you will become a skilled programmer with lots of experience and craze in your mind for Laravel.